thus cruelly sacrificed at the shrine of the Celtic bard ! Every spe- 

 cies of literary abuse is heaped upon his head. It is discovered that 

 his genius never soared above mediocrity ; that he had not even the 

 requisites of a faithful translator ; that he was unjust to his original ; 

 that he maims him by retrenchment, or deforms him by excrescences. 

 His fate we cannot help acknowledging to be merited, but it should 

 have been inflicted by other hands. He should not have had to ex- 

 claim, ''Et tu Brute !"* 



They who urge the charges of ignorance and incompetency 

 against Macpherson, pride themselves on having the genuine Poems 

 of Ossian to substantiate their charges. They are printed in a splen- 

 did edition, with a Latin version, in Sir John Sinclair's work ; and to 

 enable the mere English reader to determine how far the censures 

 heaped on Macpherson are just, a new translation by the Rev. 

 Thomas Ross, is printed with Macpherson's translation on opposite 

 pages. To the former the following notice is prefixed : " The atten- 

 tion of the reader is particularly requested to those passages in this 



* Ross, throughout the notes to his translation of the first Book of Fingal, in the first 

 volume of Sir John Sinclair's publication, is unsparing in his censure of Macpherson. He 

 accuses him of ignorance of Gaelic, of want of judgment and taste, and of frequent insertion 

 of the ideas of other poets. In a note on a speech of Cuchullin, beginning at the 101st line, 

 he asks, is this the language of a great commander, addressing his associates in arms, in a 

 grand council of war, assembled on the most pressing emergency ? Or does it not rather re- 

 semble the incoherent ravings of a madman ? Again, he avers of some ideas in a speech of 

 Calmar, lines 140-1 46, that they are borrowed from the speech of Belial in Milton, and have no 

 more connexion with Calmar's speech than the ravings of Sancho Panza with the sublimity of 

 Paradise Ijost. Once more he tells us, that " the translator, hardly ever faithful to his original, 

 departs entirely from the sense of the Gaelic poem, and disgusts his readers with the indi- 

 gested and absurd extravagancies of his own confused imagination !" Finally, he condemns 

 him for the stupidity of his conceits, for foolish pomposity of words without any conceivable 

 meaning ; for borrowing from the Scriptures and other sources ; and for the random insertion 

 of fantasies and absurdities too gross for any reflecting mind ! 



VOL. XVI. P 



