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Poems of Ossian 0/», IZ*1. /S^, £be Canterbury fl>oets. Edited by William Sharp. POEMS OF OSSIAN. SQ OEMS OF CONTENTS. viii CONTENTS. PAGE Cathlin of Clutha: a Poem . .125 sub-malla of lumon : a poem . 135 The War of Inis-thona : a Poem 4.3 The Songs of Selma . 151 Fingal: an Ancient Epic Poem- I. Book . .163 Book II. 183 Book III. .197 Book IV. .... 213 Book V. 227 Book VI. ..... 241 Lathmon : a Poem .... 255 \Dar-Thula : a Poem . .271 The Death of Cuthullin : a Poem . 289 INTRODUCTION. ROM the earliest ages mankind have been lovers of song and tale. To their singers in times of old men looked for comfort in sorrow, for inspiration in battle, and for renown after death. Of these singers were the prophets of Israel, the poets and rhapsodes of ancient Greece, the skalds of the Scandinavian sea-kings, and the bards of the Celtic race. The office was always most honour- able, the bard coming next the hero in esteem ; and thus, first of the fine arts, was cultivated the art of song. Down to quite a recent time the household of no Highland chief was complete without its bard, to sing the great deeds of the race's ancestors. And to the present day, though the locomotive and the printing press have done much to kill these customs of a more heroic age, it is not difficult to find in the Highland glens those who can still recite a " tale of the times of old." x INTRODUCTION. During the troubles of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, of the Civil Wars .and Revolu- tion in the seventeenth, and of the Parliamentary Union and Jacobite Rebellions in the early part of the eighteenth, the mind of Scotland was entirely engrossed with politics, and the Highlands them- selves were continually unsettled. No thought, therefore, could be given to the possibility of literary remains existing among the clans. It was only in the latter half of last century that secure government began to allow leisure for the growth of that culture which a few years later was to earn for Edinburgh the title of " The Modern Athens ;" and then it occurred to some of the men of letters in the Scottish capital to examine the value of the traditional lore which was known to survive in the Highlands and western isles. At length, however, the Rev. John Home, author of the tragedy of " Douglas," found a means of furthering his enquiries on the subject of Celtic poetry. At the little watering-place of Moffat, among the Dumfriesshire hills, in the summer of 1759, he met a young Highland schoolmaster named James Macpherson, who was travelling as tutor to Mr. Graham the younger, of Balgowan, and who had in his possession several transcripts of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the north. Mr. Home obtained trans- INTRODUCTION. xi lations of one or two of these poems, and finding them to be of high and singular beauty, forwarded the manuscripts to Dr. Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University. The latter gentleman was at once deeply interested in the discovery, and pressed Macpherson to furnish translations of the remain- ing pieces in his possession. This, Dr. Blair has recorded, Macpherson was very unwilling to do, declaring that they were so entirely different from the style of modern poetry as to have little chance of gaining attention, while the fire and force of the original Gaelic must be altogether lost in any translation he might be able to make. These objections, however, were finally overcome, and as a result Dr. Blair published at Edinburgh, in 1760, a small volume entitled, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translatedfrom the Gaelic or Erse language. By this publication an intense interest was at once excited among the literati of Edinburgh. Forthwith, at a dinner of the patrons and professors of literature and antiquities in the Scottish metro- polis, it was resolved to institute a search for further poetic remains, and a subscription was made for the purpose. Upon enquiry the young schoolmaster was found likely to prove a suitable agent for the enterprise. Born at Kingussie in xii INTRODUCTION. Inverness-shire in 1738, he was sufficiently familiar with the Celtic language and character, while an education for the kirk at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh had furnished him with the scholarship necessary for the selection and translation of such works of merit as might be discovered. He had also already shewn some evidence of literary taste. A few poetical pieces by him had appeared in the Scots Magazine; he had published in 1758 a poem in six cantos, entitled The Highlander ; and he had written an ode upon the arrival of the Earl Marischal in Scotland. All these facts pointed him - out as qualified in a marked degree for the task, and accordingly he was commissioned to undertake a tour through the Highlands for the purpose of collecting and preserving the remains of Gaelic poetry. Before the rebellion of 1745 the chief amusement of the Highlanders during the long dark nights of winter had been the recital of ancient tales and poems ; and many old people who remembered these still survived when Macpherson made his enquiries. He travelled through such remote parts of north-west Inverness-shire, Skye, and the western isles as were most likely to retain these traditionary remains in their most perfect form ; and it was not long before he discovered that the finest of the INTRODUCTION. xiii compositions were attributed to Ossian, the son of Fingal, a warrior bard of distant antiquity. For the collation and translation of the poems, and for the determining of obsolete words, the collector engaged the assistance of Mr. Gallie, afterwards minister in Badenoch, as well as of Mr. Macpherson of Strathmashie. Presently, by the advice of friends, he removed to London ; and there, in 1762, under the patronage of Lord Bute, he published the first results of his labour. These were two volumes of literal prose translations entitled Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books, with other lesser poems. At that time the dominating figure among the literary coteries of the metropolis was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eminent dictionary maker ; and his violent prejudices against everything Scottish were greatly in fashion. Londoners, besides, had not forgotten or forgiven the panic into which they had been thrown seventeen years previously by the march to Derby of the Highland host under the young Chevalier. The fact, therefore, that a book hailed from the north side of the Border was by no means, just then, a passport to its kindly recep- tion. The coldness with which Hume, the most illustrious historian of his time, had lately been received, and the furious attacks which were killing poor Smollett, the greatest novelist of the day, — xiv INTRODUCTION. sufficiently indicate the existing attitude of the Lon- don critics towards Scottish men of letters. When, therefore, a translator appeared, professing to have found among the mountaineers of Scotland, whom it was the fashion of the hour to ridicule, the remains of a bard who should take rank among the greatest of the world's singers, it was not at all likely that his work would pass unchallenged. It was, indeed, as if a waterspout had suddenly discharged itself into the red-hot crater of a volcano. For a short time there was the silence of utter astonishment, and then the whole energies of literary London arose to destroy and expel the intruder. To Dr. Johnson and his anti-Scottish friends the discovery of such works of genius among the people of the "bar- barous north" was so astonishing that they flatly declared it impossible ; and at once there arose upon the subject as great a controversy, probably, as has ever raged in the arena of letters. In the following year Macpherson printed a second instalment of translations Temora> an Epic Poem in eight books, with other poems ; and, as a specimen of the materials upon which his work was based, he annexed the original Gaelic to one of its divisions. With this publication Macpherson's contribution to the controversy may be said to have ended. It is true, he published a revised and rearranged version of the translations INTRODUCTION. xv in 1773. But, disgusted by the treatment he had received, he refused during his life to print another word of the originals. Only at his death it was found that he had left a thousand pounds to defray the cost of their publication. From various causes the appearance of the Gaelic text was delayed, and its issue, which would have gone far to set the question at rest, was only effected by the Highland Society of London, in 1807. By that time the forgeries of Chatterton had prejudiced the public mind, the war of words was over, and the ear of England was throbbing with the greater thunders of Trafalgar Bay. The rest of Macpherson's career may be briefly sketched. In 1764 he went out to Pensacola as private secretary to the Governor there. A differ- ence, however, arising, he gave up the position, made a tour through the West India Islands, and returned to London in 1766 with a pension of ^200 a-year. In 177 1 a volume of Gaelic antiquities which he published under the title of An Intro- duction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland^ was most bitterly attacked upon its appearance. This, with the similar abusive recep- tion accorded his prose translation of the Iliad of Homer, published in two volumes in 1773, serves to shew that the attitude towards him of the literary cliques of London had not altered in ten years xvi INTRODUCTION.
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