this time protected by the King of Munster; and the rights claimed by the former sept, to take precedence of all other military tribes, had been long a source of violent feuds between their respective chieftains. A celebrated contention of this nature between Goll and Finn Mac-Cumhal, near the palace of the latter at Almhain,* had risen to such a height that it could only be appeased, we are told, by the intervention of the bards, who, shaking the Chain of Silence between the chiefs, succeeded in calming their strife.t To such a pitch, however, had the presumption of the Clanna Boisgne at length arrived, that in the reign of Carbre, having had the audacity to defy the throne itself, they were attacked by the united force of almost all the royal troops of the kingdom (the King of Munster alone taking part with the rebellious Fians,) and a battle, memorable for its extent of carnage, ensued, in which Osgar, the son of Oisin, or Ossian, was slain by the monarch's own hand, and scarcely a man of the Clanna Boisgne escaped the slaughter of that day. The victorious monarch, too, surviving but a short time his dreadful combat with Osgar, was himself numbered among the slain.

The fame of this fatal battle of Gabhra, and the brave warriors who fell in it, continued long to be a favourite theme of the Irish bards and romancers; and upon no other foundation than the old songs respecting the heroes of this combat, mixed up with others relating to chieftains of a still more ancient date, has been raised that splendid fabric of imposture which, under the assumed name of Ossian, has for so long a period dazzled and deceived the world; being not more remarkable for the skill and fancy displayed in its execution than for the intrepidity with which its author presumed on the general ignorance and credulity of his readers.

The close connexion of this work of Macpherson with the History of Ireland, as well as of North Britain, at this period, and the false views which it is meant to convey of the early relations between the two countries, demand for it a degree of notice in these pages to which, as a mere work of fiction, however brilliant, it could not have any claim. Such notice, too, appears the more called for, from the circumstance of this fabrication forming but one of a long series of attempts, on the part of Scottish writers, to confound and even reverse the historical affinities between the two countries, for the purpose of claiming, as the property of Scotland, not only those high heroic names and romantic traditions which belong to the twilight period of Irish history we are now considering, but also the most distinguished of those numerous saints and scholars, who are known, at a later and more authentic period, to have illustrated our annals. This notable scheme, to which the community of the name of Scotia between the two countries afforded peculiar facilities, commenced so early as the thirteenth century, when, on the claim advanced by Edward I. to a feudal superiority over Scotland, it became an object with the people of that country to assert the independency of the Scotish crown, and when for the first time pretensions were set up by them to a scheme of antiquities of their own, partly borrowed from that of the parent country, but chiefly intended to supersede and eclipse it. The pretensions but faintly sketched out at that crisis, assumed, in the hands of succeeding chroniclers, a more decided shape; till at length, with the aid of the forged authorities brought forward by Hector Boece, an addition of from forty to five-and-forty Scotish kings were at once interpolated in the authentic Irish list of the Dalriadic rulers; by which means the commencement of the Scotish kingdom in Britain was removed from its true historical date,-about the beginning, as we shall see, of the sixth century,to as far back as three hundred and thirty years before the Incarnation.

It is worthy of remark, too, that far more in political objects and designs than in any romantic or vain-glorious ambition, is to be found the source of most of these efforts on the part of the Scotch to construct for themselves this sort of spurious antiquity. We have seen that the first notions of such a scheme arose out of the claims set up by Edward I. to a right of superiority over Scotland; and as the English monarch had backed his pretensions by reference to a long line of kings, through which he professed to have descended

* " Situated in Leinster. on the summit of Allen, or rather, as the natives of that country pronounce it, Allowin. The village and bog of Allen have thence derived their name. There are still the remains of some trenches on the top of the hill where Fin Mac Cumhal and his Fians were wont to celebrate their feasts."Dr. Young, Trans. Irish Acad.

"The Book of Howth affirms that, in the battle between the Fenii and Carbre, the Fenii were all de. stroyed, Oisin excepted; and that he lived till the time of St. Patrick, to whom he related the exploits of the Fenii."-Relics of Irish Poetry. See also Walker's Irish Bards. "It would be tedious," adds Miss Brooke, "to relate the various causes assigned by different writers for this battle. Historians, in general, lay the chief blame upon the Fenii; and the poets, taking part with their favourite heroes, cast the odium upon Carbre, then monarch of Ireland. The fault, most likely, was mutual."

"There are at least three Poems, of considerable antiquity, in Irish, written on the battle of Gabhra, upon which Mr. Macpherson founded his poem of Temora.'"-Essay to investigate the Authenticity, &c., by Edward O'Reilly, Esq.

§ Innes acquits his countryman Boece of having been himself the author of this forgery.—Ch. ii. art. ii. § 8.

from Brutus, Locrine, Albanact, &c., the Scotch, in their counter-memorials,* deemed it politic to have recourse to a similar parade of antiquity, and brought forward, for the first time, their additional supply of ancient kings, to meet the exigencies of the occasion. In like manner, when, at a later period, their eloquent Buchanan lent all the attractions of his style to adorn and pass into currency the absurd legends of Hector Boece respecting the forty kings, it was not that he conceived any glory or credit could redound to his country from such forgeries, but because the examples he found in these pretended records of the deposition and punishment of kings by their subjects, fell in with the principles at that time afloat respecting the king-deposing power, and afforded precedents for that right of revolt against tyranny which he had himself so strenuously and spirit. edly advocated.

From this period the boasted antiquities of the British Scots were suffered to slumber undisturbed, till, on the appearance of the work of the Bishop of St. Asaph, entitled, an Historical Account of Ancient Church Government in Great Britain and Ireland, when that learned prelate, having occasion to notice the fabricated succession of Scotish kings from an imaginary Fergus I., exposed the falsehood and utter absurdity of the whole fable. This simple historical statement called forth a champion of the forty phantom kings, in the person of Sir George Mackenzie, the King's Advocate for Scotland, who, resenting warmly, as "a degree of leze-majesté," this curtailment of the royal line, went so far as to identify the honour and safety of the British monarchy with the credit of the fabulous kings of Boece. It is, indeed, not a little curious to observe, that while political views and objects continued to be the motive of most of this zeal for the antiquities of their country, the ground taken by the Scotish champions was now completely changed; and whereas, Boece, and, far more knowingly, Buchanan, had supported the forgery of the forty kings for the sake of the weapons which it had furnished them against the sacredness of hereditary monarchy, Sir George Mackenzie, on the contrary, overlooking, or rather, perhaps, not acknowledging this alleged tendency of the Scotish fictions, upheld them as so essentially connected with the very foundations of the British monarchy, that to endeavour to bring them into any disrepute was, in his eyes, a species of high treason. The masterly hand of Bishop Stillingfleet gave the last blow to that shadowy fabric of which Sir George Mackenzie had proved himself but a feeble defender; and the pretensions of the Scots to a high line of antiquity, independent of that of their ancestors, the Irish, fell, never again to rise in the same ostensible shape. But there remained another mode of undermining the Scotic history of Ireland, or rather of confounding it with that of the Scotia derived from her, so as to transfer to the offspring much of the parent's fame; and of this Macpherson, with much ingenuity, and a degree of hardihood almost without parallel, availed himself. Counting upon the obscurity of Irish history at the commencement of the Christian era, he saw that a supposed migration of Caledonians into that country in the first century, would not only open to him a wide and safe field for the fanciful creations he meditated, but would also be the means of appropriating to his own country the romantic fame of those early heroes and bards, those traditional subjects of story and song, which are, after all, more fondly clung to by every ancient people, than even their most authentic and most honourable history.

It is true this adoption and appropriation by the British Scots, of the songs and traditions of the Irish, had been carried on for ages before the period when it was so expertly turned to account by Macpherson; being the natural result of the intimate intercourse so long subsisting between the two countries. The original fragments, indeed, of Erse poetry, which formed the foundation of most of his Epics, were, in fact, but versions of

These memorials, which were addressed to the Pope, are to be found in Hearne's edition of Fordun, "Those productions of the Scots (says Innes,) I mean as to their remote antiquities, ought to be considered such as they truly were, as the pleadings of advocates, who commonly make no great difficulty to advance with great assurance all that makes for the advantage of their cause or clients, though they have but probable grounds, and sometimes bare conjectures to go upon."-Critical Essay.

It is but fair to observe, that by none of these writers was so bold a defiance of the voice of history ventured upon as to deny that the Scots of Albany had originally passed over from Ireland. Even Sir George Mackenzie, who endeavours to set aside the relationship as much as possible, says,-" We acknowledge our selves to have come last from Ireland;" while of all those Scotish writers who preceded him in the same track, John Major, Hector Boece, Leslie, Buchanan, not a single one has thought of denying that the Scots were originally of Irish extraction. See Ogygia Vindicated, chap. 3.

1 In his work De Jure regni apud Scotos.

§ See his letter to the lord chancellor, wherein Sir George "admires that any of the subjects of Great Bri tain did not think it a degrees of lese-majesty to injure and shorten the royal line of their kings."

In speaking of the Scoto Irish chiefs of Argyleshire, Sir Walter Scott says, (Hist. of Scotland, vol. i. ch. 2.) "Not to incur the charge of leze-majesté, brought by Sir G. Mackenzie against Dr. Stillingfleet, for abridging the royal pedigree by some links, we will briefly record that, by the best authorities, twenty-eight of these Dalriadic kings or chiefs reigned successively in Argyleshire." It was, however, not in reference to the Dalriadic kings that Sir George's remark was made, nor was it directed against Stilling geet, but against Lloyd, the learned Bishop of St. Asaph.

old Irish songs relating to the Fenian heroes,* which, though attributed to the poet Oisin, were the productions of bards of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and, finding their way among the highlanders of Britain, from the close connexion between the two countries, came, in the course of time, to be adopted by them, both heroes and songs, as their own.t

The various adaptations and corruptions of the original ballads by which this process of naturalization was effected, and the chieftains Finn, Oisin, Osgar, Cuchullin, Goll MacMorn were all in the Erse songs converted into Highland heroes, have been pointed out by critics familiar with the dialects of both countries; and though some of the variations from the original ballads arose, doubtless, from the want of a written standard, there occur others such as the omission frequently of the name of Ireland, and of St. Patrick -which could have arisen from no other cause than a deliberate intention to deceive.

In all such prepense modes of falsification, Macpherson improved boldly on his rude originals; though still with so little regard to consistency, as often to justify the suspicion, that his great success was owing fully as much to the willingness of others to be deceived, as to his own talent in deceiving. The conversion of Finn, an Irish chieftain of the third century, into a Caledonian "King of Morven," and the chronological blunder of giving him Cuchullin for a contemporary, who had flourished more than two centuries before, arc errors, which, gross as they are, might, under cover of the darkness of Irish history, at that period, have been expected to pass unnoticed. But his representing this Finn, or Fingal, as in the year 208 commanding the Caledonians against Caracalla,|| and then bringing him forward again, at the interval of more than a century, to contend with Cathmor in single combat, is one of those daring flights of improbability and absurdity, upon which none but a writer so conscious of his own powers of imposture could have ventured. T

*For the best account of these Fenian Poems, and of the general nature of their style and subjects, the reader is referred to an able essay on the authenticity of Ossian's Poems, by Dr. William Hamilton Drummond, in the 16th volume of the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. A MS. collection of the Fenian tales and songs is said to be in the possession of Mr. James Hardiman, the intelligent author of the History of Galway.

Even among the Lowlanders, too, the traditional renown of Finn and his heroes had long made itself known, as the following instance proves:-When Bruce was defeated by MacDougal, Lord of Lorn, he placed himself in the rear of his retreating followers, and checked the pursuit. "Behold him," said MacDougal to one of his leaders, "he protects his followers against us, as Gaul, the son of Morni, defended his tribe against the rage of Fingal."-Quoted from Barbour, in an article of the Edinburgh Review, (attributed, I believe justly, to the pen of Sir Walter Scott,) on the Report of the Highland Society, vol. vi. That the true birthplace, however, of Finn and his heroes was sometimes acknowledged even in Scotland, appears from two verses, quoted in the same article, from the old Scotch poet Douglas:

"Great Gow MacMorn, and Fin MacCoul, and how
They suld be Goddis in Ireland, as men say."

Neither were the English ignorant of our claims to these ancient heroes and bards, as may be seen from the following passage quoted by Camden, in speaking of the Irish:-"They think the souls of the deceased are in communion with famous men of those places, of whom they retain many stories and sonnets, as of the giants Fin MacHuyle, O'Shin MacOwen; and they say, through illusion, that they often see them."

The origin of the addition of the word Gal to Finn's name is thus satisfactorily explained: Gal, the latter part of the compound, signifies a stranger; and being applied by Scotchmen to Fin, the son of Cumhal, it affords a decisive proof that they did not consider him as their countryman."-Essay on Ossian, by the Rev. Dr. Drummond.

Of one of these Erse Poems, a Conversation between Ossian and St. Patrick, Dr. Young says:-" The Highland Sgeulaiches have been very busy in corrupting this poem, partly of necessity from the want of a written standard. ...... From their vain desire of attributing Fin Mac-Cumhal and his heroes to Scotland, they seem to have intentionally corrupted it in some passages, as may be seen by comparing the Erse copies with each other. Thus, in the verse before us, the word Ireland is omitted." Again Dr. Young remarks:"The Highland Sgeulaiches have taken the liberty of totally perverting this stanza, and changing it into another, which might make Fin Mac Cumbal their own countryman."

§ The late Dr. Young, Bishop of Clonfert, who, in the year 1784, made a tour to the Highlands of Scotland, for the purpose of seeing the original poems from which Macpherson had constructed his Epics, has accused him of altering the dates of his originals, of attributing to them a much higher antiquity than belongs to them, of suppressing the name of St. Patrick, and, in short, of corrupting and falsifying, by every means, even the few scanty fragments of Irish poetry he could produce to sanction his imposture.

See Gibbon's detection of the anachronism of Macpherson respecting Caracalla, (vol. i. ch. 6) where, however, he expresses himself with a degree of deference and timidity well deserving of Hume's rebuke to him on his credulity. "You are therefore," says his shrewd friend, "over and above indulgent to us in speaking of the matter with hesitation."

The primary and insurmountable argument against even the possibility of their authenticity, is thus well stated by Hume:"It is, indeed, strange that any man of sense could have imagined it possible that above twenty thousand verses, along with numberless historical facts, could have been preserved by oral tradition during fifty generations, by the rudest, perhaps, of all the European nations, the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled. Where a supposition is so contrary to common sense, any positive evidence of it ought never to be regarded."-Letter to Gibbon, in Gibbon's Memoirs of his own Life and Writings.

So slow, however, has the delusion been in passing away, that so late as the year 1825, when Armstrong's Gaelic Dictionary was published, we find the author of that work boasting of Ossian, as "the great poet of the Gael," and citing him as authority for the early manners and customs of the Highlanders.

It is true that, in most of those poems, attributed to our bard Oisin, which funished the grounds, or rather pretext, for the elaborate forgeries of Macpherson, the very same license of anachronism is found to prevail. The son of Finn, in these rude and spurious productions, has not only his life prolonged as far as the fifth century for the convenience of conversing with St. Patrick, but finds himself engaged, so late as the commencement of the twelfth, in single combat with the Norwegian king, Magnus. It is to be remembered, however, that these vagaries of chronology occur in detached pieces of poetry, written by different authors, and at different periods; whereas, the pretended epics of Ossian are the production professedly of one great and known poet, at a defined period of history; and yet, in the very face of this assumed character, abound with such monstrous anachronisms, such utter confusion of times, places, persons, and manners as renders the belief, for so long a period, in the authenticity of such a work, one of the most startling marvels in all literary history.

To mention but two or three more instances in which this personator of a bard of the third century forestalls the manners and customs of a far later period, we find him bestowing on his Irish heroes, some centuries before the coat of mail was introduced, bright corslets of steel,* and describing castles as existing in Ireland, at a time when the most stately palaces of her kings were as yet constructed but of wood. In still more wanton defiance both of history and common sense, he brings together the expedition of Caracalla at the commencement of the third century, that of Carausius at its close, and the invasions of the Danes and Norwegians, in the ninth and tenth centuries, as all of them contemporary events.

Not content with the many violations of chronology that have been mentioned, the pretended translator of Ossian takes no less liberties both with geography and topography, transporting Moylena, for instance, the scene of two famous battles, from the King's County to Ulster, and transferring even Teamor, or Tara, the celebrated residence of the ancient monarchs, from its natural site in Meath to the same northern province.† While thus lavishing upon Ulster glories that do not belong to it, he has, on the other hand, robbed it of some peculiarly its own; and passing in silence over the memorable Emania, the seat of the old Ultonian kings, he has chosen to substitute some castle of Tura, his own invention, in its place. Instead of Craove-Roe, too, the military school of the Red-Branch Knights, near Emania, he has called up some structure, under the exotic name of Muri's Hall, which is no less the baseless fabric of his own fancy than the castle of Tura.t

It may be thought that animadversions of this nature upon a romance still so popular, belong more properly to the department of criticism than of history. But a work which Gibbon, in tracing the fortunes of Imperial Rome, has turned aside from his stately march to notice, may well lay claim to some portion of attention from the humble historian of the country to which all the Chiefs so fabulously commemorated by it, in reality belonged. Had the aim of the forgery been confined to the ordinary objects of romance, namely, to delight and interest, any such grave notice of its anachronisms and inconsistencies would have been here misplaced. But the imposture of Macpherson was, at the least, as much historical as poetical. His suppression, for it could hardly have been ignorance, of the true history of the Irish settlement in Argyleshire, so early as the middle of the third century, a fact fatal to the whole groundwork of his pretended Scottish history,-could have proceeded only from a deliberate system of deception, having for its object so far to reverse the historical relationship between the two countries, as to make Scotland the

* "The Irish annalists speak of the Danes in the latter end of the eighth century, as being covered with armour; but they never speak of the Irish troops being so equipped. Giraldus Cambrensis describes particularly the arms of the Irish, but says not one word of their wearing armour."-Essay upon Ossian, by Edward O'Reilly. Esq.

For a more detailed exposure of these, and many other such blunders, see Dissertation on the First Migrations and Final Settlement of the Scots in North Britain, by Mr. O'Connor, of Belanagare.

The fortress of Tura is, indeed, mentioned by Mr. Beauford, who as an authority, however, is of little more value than Macpherson himself:-" In the neighbourhood of Cromla," says this writer, "stood the rath or fortress of Tura, called by the Irish writers Alich Neid."-Ancient Topography of Ireland.

Some of his own countrymen think more charitably of him:-" Above all," says a writer already referred to, "Macpherson was ignorant of the real history of the colony of the Dalriads, or Irish Scots, who possessed themselves of a part of Argyleshire, in the middle of the third century; an indubitable fact, inconsistent with his whole system."-Edinburgh Review, vol. xvi., Report of the Highland Society. We are, however, justified in imputing to Macpherson something much worse than ignorance, when, in works professedly historical and argumentative, we find him falling into the same disingenuous practices, and not hesitating to alter, suppress or falsify, according as it suited his immediate purpose. Of all this he is proved to have been guilty in his Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland. "The total omission," says his opponent, "of some expressions that must have disproved the application of the passages, the careful discharge of all hostile words from the quotations, and the officious interpolation of friendly in their room-facts that appear evident upon the face of the extracts above-certainly give an unhappy aspect of disingenuousness to the whole, and may seem to discredit the integrity and honour of Mr. Macpherson."-Genuine History of the Britons Asserted, chap. i.

sole source of all those materials for poetry which she had in reality derived through colonization from Ireland.

The weight given to these compositions, as historical evidences, by the weak credulity with which they were at first received, has now long passed away. But it ought never, in recording the "follies of the wise," to be forgotten that the critical Blair believed implicitly in the genuineness of these rhapsodies; and that by two grave historians, Henry and Whitaker, they have been actually referred to as authentic historical documents; the former having made use of their authority in illustrating the early poetry of the Britons, while the latter, in his account of the expedition of the emperor Severus into North Britain, makes up for the silence of all the ancient historians, as to its details, by some important particulars derived from the authentic page of the Bard of Selma; informing us that Fingal, who was at that time, as it seems, the Pendragon of Caledonia, negotiated a peace with the Romans,* upon the banks of the river Carron. With the same ludicrous seriousness, in relating the events of the naval expedition, under Niall Giallach, against the coasts of Britain, he describes the movements of the numerous navy of the ancient Irish, the boatmen singing to the chime of their oars, and the music of the harp, the shield of the admiral hung upon the mast, "a sufficient mark of itself in the day, and frequently beat as a signal at night,”—all upon the joint authority of the poets, Claudian and Ossian!

In one point of view, the imposture has not been unserviceable to the cause of histori cal truth, inasmuch as, by directing public attention to the subject, it has led to a more correct and more generally diffused knowledge of the early relations between Scotland and Ireland, and rendered impossible, it is to be hoped, any recurrence of that confusion between the annals of the two countries,-that mist thrown purposely, in many instances, around their early connexion,-in which alone such antiquarian pretensions and historical fictions as those of Fordun, Hector Boece, Dempster, and lastly, Macpherson himself, could have hoped to escape detection. The spirit of inquiry, too, that was awakened by so long a course of controversy, has proved favourable no less to the literary than to the historical claims of ancient Ireland; as it was found that, in her songs and romances, which had been adopted by the Scots of Britain, as well as her heroes, lay the groundwork, however scanty, of this modern fabric of fiction; that, so far from her descendants, the Scots of Albany, having any pretensions to an original literature or distinct school of poesy, there had never existed, among the Highlanders, any books but Irish; and while the scholars of Ireland could boast of manuscripts in their own tongue, near a thousand years old, it was not till so late as the year 1778 that even a Grammar of the Erse dialect of the Gaelic was in existence.

It has been already mentioned, that between the Irish and the first inhabitants of North Britain there had commenced an intercourse at a very early period. According to all accounts, the ancient Pictish colony that finally fixed themselves in Britain, had, on their way to that country, rested for a time in Ireland, and had been provided from thence, at their own request, with wives. The friendship founded upon this early connexion was kept alive by continued intercourse between the two nations; and though the footing the Irish obtained in the third century upon the western coast of North Britain, produced a jealousy which sometimes disturbed, and, even at one period, endangered this small colony, the advantage derived by both nations from such an alliance, kept their fierce and feverish union unbroken. In addition to the pride which Ireland naturally felt in the task of watching over and nursing into vigour that germ of future dominion which she had planted in North Britain, her kings and princes, eternally at war with each other, as naturally looked beyond their own shores for allies; and, accordingly, as in the instance of the monarch Tuathal, who owed his throne to the aid of Pictish arms, we

History of Manchester, book i. chap. xii. sect. 2.

"It might boldly be averred that the Irish, who have written a host of grammars, did not derive their prosody from the Caledonians, who, till within these thirty years, had never possessed so much as the skeleton of a national grammar."-Davies's Claims of Ossian. Dr. Ferguson, too, in his communication to the Highland Society, admits that there were no books in the Gaelic language but the manuals of religion; and these in so awkward and clumsy a spelling, that few could read them."

According to some writers, almost the whole of this Irish colony, reduced to extremity by the constant attacks of the Picts, were compelled, in the middle, it is said, of the fifth century, (about fifty years before the establishment of the Scotic kingdom in North Britain,) to abandon their possessions in Argyleshire, and take flight to Ireland, where they found a refuge in the hereditary territory of the Dalriadic princes. Neither in Tigernach, however, nor in the Annals of the Four Masters, does there occur any mention of such an event, which seems to depend wholly upon the authority of the Scotish writers, Major, Boece, Buchanan, &c., whose misrepresentation of most of the other facts connected with the event, renders them but suspicious testimonies on the subject of the Dalriadic settlement. Mr. O'Connor, however, has adopted the same unauthorized view. "The British Dalriada," he states, "was exercised by frequent hostilities from the Cruthneans, and, at one period, with so good success, that they forced almost the whole colony to take flight into Ireland, under their leader, Eochad Munrevar, who found a secure retreat for his followers in the Irish Dalriada."— Dissert, on Hist. of Scotland.