OF THE PASSIONS. 



451 



Helm, nor hawberk's twisted mail, 

 Nor e'en thy virtues, tyrant ! shall avail 

 To save thy secret soul from nightly fears — 

 From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears! — 

 Fond, impious man ! think'st thou yon sanguine cloud 

 Raised by thy breath, has queiicli'd the orb of day 1 

 To-morrow he repairs the golden flood, 

 And warms the nations with redoubled ray. 

 Enough for me !— with joy I see 

 The different doom our fates assign. 

 Be thine despair, and sceptred care- 

 To triumph and to die are mine. — ' 



He spoke: and headlong from the mountain's height 



Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night. 



The first of these descriptions is derived from a people of Gothic or Scythian 

 origin, whose ferocity of manners I have formerly pointed out, and endea- 

 voured to account for : the second refers to a race of Celts or Cym- 

 brians, for the most part of milder affections, and some tribes of which ap- 

 pear at a very early era of their history, and even in the infancy of civilization, 

 to have evinced a tenderness of sentiment, a fecundity of imagery, and a 

 cultivation of style, that are truly wonderful, and have never been satisfac- 

 torily accounted for. And I now particularly allude to the traditional poems 

 of the Highlands and the adjoining isles, so well known from Mr. Macpherson's 

 translation, and occasional interweavings. Such is the elegance and delicacy 

 of taste, as well as sublime genius and national enthusiasm, of these singular 

 productions, that Dr. Johnson, as many of us may perhaps recollect, was to 

 the last an infidel as to their genuineness. The first, however, has been sutfi- 

 ciently ascertained of late by the indefatigable and valuable exertions of the 

 Highland Society, formed for the express purpose of inquiring into the nature 

 and authenticity of the poems of Ossian, the Homer of the Highlands ; whose 

 report has been published by Mr. Mackenzie, their liberal and enlightened 

 chairman. They have sutficiently established the important fact, that Ossian 

 is not an imaginary being ; that his name and general history are at this 

 moment preserved by tradition over the whole of the Highlands and the 

 Hebrides ; and that several of his poems, to an extent of many hundred 

 lines, as literally rendered by Macpherson, still live in the memory of many 

 of the oldest inhabitants, of the simplest manners, and who are incapable 

 either of writing or reading, having been taught them by their fathers in early 

 life-, as their fathers had in like manner received them from a long line of 

 progenitors through an immemorial period. These poems, or fragments of 

 poems, have in various instances been taken down in the original Gaelic, from 

 the mouths of the venerable reciters by persons of the greatest respectability, 

 many of them appointed for this purpose by the Society 1 am now speaking 

 ■of ; and on being compared with each other, and with Macpherson's version, 

 have been found to possess a close and literal agreement, in many instances 

 through a range of some hundreds of lines, particularly in the important poems 

 of Caricthuraand Fingal. While, to enable the public to form a fuller judgment 

 upon the subject, and to free themselves from every charge of prejudice, the 

 committee, in their very excellent report, have not only given an unmutilated 

 copy of their correspondence, but extensive specimens of the original Gaelic 

 itself, together with a new and verbal translation as well as Mr. Macpherson's 

 version. 



Against such evidence it is impossible to shut our eyes; and admitting it, 

 we must conclude with the committee, that, though Mr. Macpherson may 

 have taken occasional liberties with the text from which he translated, omitted 

 some passages, and supplied others that were perhaps lost, yet that the poetry 

 called Ossianic is genuine ; that it was common, and in great abundance ; 

 that it was peculiarly striking and impressive, and in a high degree eloquent, 

 tender, and sublime. Of the epoch in which Ossian flourished we can form 

 a tolerable guess : for, with occasional references to several of the earlier 

 Roman emperors, and especially to Caracalla, the son of Severus, who by 

 Ossian is called Caracal, we find through the whole of his accredited poems 

 a total uriacquaintance with the Christian religion ; and hence he can scarcely 



