To a reader unacquainted with Gaelic, comparing MacPherson’s English with Mr. Clerk’s, it certainly looks unlikely that the Gaelic can be merely a translation from the former.  The reflection in a mirror cannot be more distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk’s version can be trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than MacPherson’s) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a meaning quite different from his rendering.  Take, e.g., the closing passage of the second “Duan,” or book, of “Fingal.”

“An arrow found his manly breast.  He sleeps with his loved Galbina at the noise of the sounding surge.  Their green tombs are seen by the mariner, when he bounds on the waves of the north.”—­MacPherson.

“A ruthless arrow found his breast. 
His sleep is by thy side, Galbina,
Where wrestles the wind with ocean. 
The sailor sees their graves as one,
When rising on the ridge of the waves.”

          
                    —­Clerk

But again Mr. Archibald Sinclair, a Glasgow publisher, a letter from whom is given by Mr. Campbell in his “Tales of the West Highlands,” has “no hesitation in affirming that a considerable portion of the Gaelic which is published as the original of his [MacPherson’s] translation, is actually translated back from the English.”  And Professor Sullivan says:  “The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed evidently with great labor afterward, in which sentences or parts of sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior word-paste of MacPherson’s own."[23]

It is of course no longer possible to maintain what Mr. Campbell says is the commonest English opinion, viz., that MacPherson invented the characters and incidents of his “Ossian,” and that the poems had no previous existence in any shape.  The evidence is overwhelming that there existed, both in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales, and poems popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn MacCumhail.  But no poem has been found which corresponds exactly to any single piece in MacPherson; and Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and undoubted remains of Celtic poetry.  Between 1760, the date of MacPherson’s “Fragments,” and 1807, the date of the Highland Society’s text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie’s collection, 1786, and Stewart’s, 1804.  In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his “Ancient Lays,” a free translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787) under the title “Sean Dana,” Smith frankly took liberties with his originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase rested, he enabled the public to see how far his “Ancient Lays,” were really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his own editorial labors.[24]