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the king of woody Morven, an obscure district in Argyleshire, the 

 name of which, till now, had never been heard beyond its own limits. 

 Her pride was alarmed, her history falsified, her literary glory threa- 

 tened with extinction ; and though fully aware of the invalidity and 

 falsehood of all rival claims, she was not at the instant prepared to 

 confute them. The sudden and unexpected invasion surprised, but 

 did not rob her either of the courage or the weapons by which it 

 could be successfully repelled. 



A short time after Macpherson's first publication of Ossian, while 

 he was in London, passing a second edition through the press, an ad- 

 vertisement appeared in the Dublin Freeman's Journal, announcing 

 the speedy publication of Fingal, " a poem originally wrote in the 

 Irish or Erse language, and stating that the translation would set 

 forth all the blunders and absurdities in the edition now printing in 

 London." This gave Macpherson apparently just room to complain, 

 " that a gentleman in Dublin accused him to the public of commit- 

 ting blunders and absurdities in translating the language of his own 

 country, and that before any translation of his appeared." The last 

 clause of the complaint was untrue, for his translation had appeared 

 in Edinburgh in June of the preceding year. But as no poem of the 

 name of Fingal is known to exist in the L'ish language, no Irish gen- 

 tleman could have thought of making such an announcement. Theophi- 

 lus O'Flanagan, Secretary of the Gaelic Society of Dublin, accuses 

 Macpherson of having himself inserted that advertisement ; and the 

 charge is, in all probability, well founded. Such an artifice accords with 

 the disingenuousness of his whole character, and no doubt, it ren- 

 dered good service to his cause in exciting public attention, and cre- 

 ating a belief that an Irish original did actually exist. 



But nothing is more difllicult than to carry on such a literary im- 

 position long, without some untoward circumstance awakening suspi- 



