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in the year 432, and died in the year 492. Osslan, therefore, to have 

 been contemporary with Saint Patrick, must have hved upwards of 

 two hundred years, which no man in his senses will believe. Those, 

 therefore, who suppose that Ossian could have been the author of the 

 Irish poems attributed to him, are as far from the truth as those who 

 believe that the bard was contemporary with Cuchullin, who was 

 dead two hundred years before Ossian was born. 



From what we have shewn it is clear that neither the poems pub- 

 lished by Macpherson, or the Highland Society, nor those preserved 

 in Irish manuscripts, are the genuine works of Ossian, the son of 

 Fionn Mac Cubhaill (Mac Coo-all.) It may be asked then, who 

 was the author of those poems ? For so far as relates to the poems 

 contained in Irish manuscripts, we acknowledge our ignorance of the 

 author, or authors, for we believe they are not the work of any one 

 bard. But of the author of the poems published under the name of 

 Ossian by Macpherson, or of those originals published by the High- 

 land Society, we make no such confession. We have already shewn, 

 from a variety of proofs, that the Ossian's poems of Macpherson 

 never appeared in their present form until they were so manufac- 

 tured by him, from materials stolen from Irish poems ascribed to the 

 Irish Ossian, and from the popular tales of the Irish. We have also 

 shewn, that the so-called "originals'* of the Society, agreeing in 

 form with the fabrication of Mr. Macpherson, and written in a cor- 

 rupt vulgar dialect of the Gaelic, without one of the essentials belong- 

 ing to the Gaelic verse, are the forgeries of our own times, the work 

 of either Macpherson himself, (if he were capable of executing such a 

 task, which, we confess, we think he was not,) or of some person 

 employed by him, or else by his executors, to translate his English 

 into Gaelic, to save them from the effects of the law-suit impending 

 over them, instituted by the Highland Society to recover from them 



