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a few ignorant senachies might be persuaded out of their own opinion by the smoothness of an Irish tale, it was impossible to eradicate from among the bulk of the people their own national traditions. These traditions afterwards so much prevailed, that the Highlanders continue totally unacquainted with the pretended Hibernian extract of the Scottish nation. Ignorant chronicle writers, strangers to the ancient language of their country, preserved only from falling to the ground so improbable a story.

It was during the period I have mentioned, that the Irish became acquainted with, and carried into their country the compositions of Ossian. The scene of many of the pieces being in Ireland, suggested first to them a hint of making both heroes and poet natives of that island. In order to do this effectually, they found it necessary to reject the genuine poems, as every line was pregnant with proofs of their Scottish original, and to dress up a fable on the same subject in their own language. So ill qualified, however, were their bards to effectuate this change, that amidst all their desires to make the Fiona Irishmen, they every now and then called them Siol Albin.' It was probably, after a succession of some generations, that the bards had effrontery enough to establish an Irish genealogy for Fion, and deduce him from the Milesian race of kings. In some of the oldest Irish poems on the subject, the great-grand-father of Fion is made a Scandinavian; and his heroes are often called SIOL LOCHLIN NA BEUM, i. e. the race of Lochlin of wounds.' The only poem that runs up the family of Fion to Nuades Niveus, king of Ireland, is evidently not above a hundred and fifty years old; for, if I mistake not, it mentions the Earl of Tyrone, so famous in Elizabeth's time.

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This subject, perhaps, is pursued further than it deserves; but a discussion of the pretensions of Ireland to Ossian, was become in some measure necessary. the Irish poems concerning the Fiona should appea ridiculous, it is but justice to observe, that they scarcely more so than the poems of other nations

that period. On other subjects, the bards of Ireland have displayed a genius worthy of any age or nation. It was alone in matters of antiquity that they were monstrous in their fables. Their love-sonnets, and their elegies on the death of persons worthy or renowned, abound with such beautiful simplicity of sentiment, and wild harmony of numbers, that they become more than an atonement for their errors in every other species of poetry. But the beauty of these species depend so much on a certain curiosa felicitas' of expression in the original, that they must appear much to disadvantage in another language.

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A

CRITICAL DISSERTATION

ON THE

POEMS OF OSSIAN,

THE

SON OF FINGAL.

BY HUGH BLAIR, D. D.

One of the Ministers of the High Church, and Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh.

A

CRITICAL DISSERTATION

ON THE

POEMS OF OSSIAN,

THE

SON OF FINGAL.

--0000000

AMONG the monuments remaining of the ancient state of nations, few are more valuable than their poems or songs. History, when it treats of remote and dark ages, is seldom very instructive. The beginnings of society, in every country, are involved in fabulous confusion; and though they were not, they would furnish few events worth recording. But, in every period of society, human manners are a curious spectacle; and the most natural pictures of ancient manners are exhibited in the ancient poems of nations. These present to us, what is much more valuable than the history of such transactions as a rude age can afford: the history of human imagination and passion. They make us acquainted with the notions and feelings of our fellow-creatures in the most artless ages: discovering what objects they admired, and what pleasures they pursued, before those refinements of society had taken place, which enlarge indeed, and diversify the transaction, but disguise the manners of mankind.

Besides this merit which ancient poems have with philosophical observers of human nature, they have another with persons of taste. They promise some of the highest beauties of poetical writing. Irregular and unpolished we may expect the productions of uncultivated ages to be; but abounding, at the same time, with that enthusiasm, that vehemence and fire, which are the soul of poetry. For many circumstances of those times which we call barbarous, are favourable t

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