that his supplementary labours were considerable! how selfish his conduct, contrasted with that of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!—­Open this far-famed Book!—­I have done so at random, and the beginning of the Epic Poem Temora, in eight Books, presents itself.  ’The blue waves of Ullin roll in light.  The green hills are covered with day.  Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze.  Grey torrents pour their noisy streams.  Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain.  The blue course of a stream is there.  On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha.  His spear supports the king; the red eyes of his fear are sad.  Cormac rises on his soul with all his ghastly wounds.’  Precious memorandums from the pocket-book of the blind Ossian!

If it be unbecoming, as I acknowledge that for the most part it is, to speak disrespectfully of Works that have enjoyed for a length of time a widely-spread reputation, without at the same time producing irrefragable proofs of their unworthiness, let me be forgiven upon this occasion.—­Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian.  From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious.  In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness.  In Macpherson’s work it is exactly the reverse; everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,—­yet nothing distinct.  It will always be so when words are substituted for things.  To say that the characters never could exist, that the manners are impossible, and that a dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which Macpherson defied; when, with the steeps of Morven before his eyes, he could talk so familiarly of his Car-borne heroes;—­of Morven, which, if one may judge from its appearance at the distance of a few miles, contains scarcely an acre of ground sufficiently accommodating for a sledge to be trailed along its surface.—­Mr. Malcolm Laing has ably shown that the diction of this pretended translation is a motley assemblage from all quarters; but he is so fond of making out parallel passages as to call poor Macpherson to account for his ‘ands’ and his ‘buts!’ and he has weakened his argument by conducting it as if he thought that every striking resemblance was a conscious plagiarism.  It is enough that the coincidences are too remarkable for its being probable or possible that they could arise in different minds without communication between them.  Now as the Translators of the Bible, and Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, could not be indebted to Macpherson, it follows that he must have owed his fine feathers