20 



during his whole course of inquiry, appears divested of prepossessions, 

 and guided only by the love of truth. In his publication nothing is 

 strained, nothing distorted ; his facts are collected with philosophical 

 calmness, and his deductions drawn with mathematical precision." 



But notwithstanding the whole mass of Irish authority, historical, 

 antiquarian, and critical, was so unhesitating, so unanimous, and so 

 decisive, the question still continued to be agitated. Grave English 

 and Scottish writers suffered themselves to be deceived, and the 

 stream of history was in some danger of being polluted by the lees of 

 Ossianic fiction. Not only did critics like Blair and Karnes delude 

 themselves and others, but professed historians began to appeal to 

 Macpherson's Ossian as to authentic historical documents. Whitaker, 

 in his History of Manchester, published in London, 1773, says of 

 those poems, that " they carry in themselves sufficient proofs of their 

 authenticity;"* and acting on this conviction, weaves part of his his- 

 toric web with the spider-thread woof of Caledonian fancy. " The 

 last considerable attempt," as he obligingly informs us, " to reduce the 

 Caledonians, was made by the Roman Emperor in person, by Severus, 

 and the collected power of the empire under him. And they were 

 then subject to Fingal, the Vind-Gall or head of the Britons, the son 

 of Comhall, the grandson of Trathal, and the great grandson of Tren- 

 mor, a dictator fit to be the antagonist of Severus, and a chief wor- 

 thy to be the hero of Ossian. "j- Henry, also, wha wrote the History 

 of England, expresses himself a sound believer in the authenticity of 

 Ossian, and illustrates the subject of the early poetry of the Britons 

 at great length, by copious extracts from Macpherson's Ossian's 

 Poems, as if they were all genuine! J But Irish writers, who had access 

 to the real sources of Irish history and antiquities, were not thus 

 deceived. They detected and exposed the novel theories which had 



« Vol. i. p. 24. f Vol. ii. p. 214. J Henry's England, book i. c. 5. 



