334 TKANSACTIONS OP THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VOL. IV. 



asseverations which the Report contains regarding the manner that he 

 adopted in all likelihood in arranging his material. It is obvious that, 

 as many versions of the same poem or episode were current, owing to 

 the universal tendency of oral tradition, MacPherson was compelled out of 

 regard to lucidity and continuity of thought and sentiment, to make a 

 judicious rearrangement of the poems or fragments of poems that fell 

 into his hands. Pisistratus, or whoever collected and arranged the poems 

 of Homer, must have followed a similar plan in the arrangement of the 

 Homeric poems that came into his possession. There is, and must be, 

 however, a wide diversity between such an arrangement of poetical 

 matter that was available, and between the excogitation of such poems. 

 Campbell is profuse in his admissions that traditional poems in 

 abundance, written or unwritten and attributed to Ossian, were current 

 in the Highlands and accessible to MacPherson. His grave objection is, 

 that the Gaelic Ossian of 1807 and the Sean Dana of 1787 are almost 

 unknown to the class that recite Gaelic poems which they attribute to 

 Ossian. " The Sean Dana and the Gaelic Ossian are nowhere to be 

 found in any of these collections made from the people." The modern 

 opponents of MacPherson and of the Sean Dana fail, it is very much to 

 be feared, in assigning its due significance to the fact, that almost half a 

 century intervened between the translation of the poems of Ossian by 

 MacPherson and the publication of the Gaelic Ossian — to employ 

 Campbell's own phrase. During so long an intcr\-al, much useful poetical 

 material must have been irrecoverably lost. 



As a centur\-, with all its changes and transformations in the Highlands 

 of Scotland, intervened between MacPherson 's poetical mission through 

 the Highlands and the laudable labour of Campbell in gathering the 

 material of Leabhar na Feinne ; no injustice is done to Campbell when it 

 is contended, tliat he must of necessity have been an imperfect judge of 

 the facilities which MacPherson must have had in preparing the poems 

 of Ossian for publication. And when ever}' deference is made to the 

 frequent allegation of Campbell, that he failed to find Gaelic similar to 

 that of the Gaelic Ossian and the Sean Dana, it surely does not follow 

 that such Gaelic did not exist, unless, indeed, we are to concede that 

 Campbell had accurate knowledge of all the Gaelic that was either 

 spoken or written in Scotland during the long years that passed between 

 1760 and 1872. It would surely be a violation of all honest criticism to 

 admit, that poems must necessaril)^ have been invented or forged, because, 

 forsooth, an enthusiastic lover of his countrv's literature did not discover 

 amid all his efforts to disentomb the records of an almost forgotten past, 

 any poetry to correspond exactly in language and sentiment with those 

 poems. Every Gaelic scholar will at once perceive that the Gaelic of 



