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the repayment of the enormous sum of money which Macpherson had 

 received under the false pretence of publishing his originals of Ossian. 



Having shewn that the poems could not have been written by 

 Ossian, the son of Fionn, or Fingal, if he must be so called, and that 

 they are of modern fabrication, manufactured from Irish poems and 

 tales, it only remains for us, in pursuit of the design of the Royal 

 Irish Academy, " to assign the probable Era and Country of the Ori- 

 ginal Poet or Poets." 



With respect to the poems of Ossian, as published by Mr. Mac- 

 pherson and the Society, we again say, and we cannot repeat it too 

 often, that they are the works of our own times, forged from mate- 

 rials stolen from Irish poems, the works of Irish bards. The country 

 of the original poets, notwithstanding the present disguised appear- 

 ance of the poems, must therefore be Ireland. We have produced 

 extracts from Irish poems and tales, and have compared them with 

 passages in Macpherson's Ossian, which must put the question of ori- 

 ginality for ever at rest. The language of the Irish poems has all 

 the appearance of genuine antiquity, not indeed of so early a period 

 as the days of Ossian, but certainly of very remote times ; the lan- 

 guage is correct, the versification, also, is composed according to all the 

 rules of Gaelic prosody ; but the Gaelic poems of the Society have 

 every thing that is necessary to prove their modern origin. They are 

 incorrect in every particular belonging to ancient Gaelic language, and 

 they bid defiance to all the rules of Gaelic prosody. They contain in 

 them the substance stolen from the Irish poems, but those who stole 

 the ideas were afraid to use the language of the originals. That would, 

 they thought, at once discover the theft, and, to prevent that, they 

 were obliged to have recourse to a modern orthography, a base dia- 

 lect, and to renounce all claims to any thing resembling Gaelic verse j 



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