Blair Collection > Celtic gleanings, or, Notices of the history and literature of the Scottish Gael

LECTURE I. O
of life, and bad his statements met, not with
arguments, but with sneers. Any man who
reads the strictures of Dr Samuel Johnson, or
of John Pinkerton, or Malcolm Laing, will re-
quire no farther proof of this ; and assured-
ly never did there exist men who, in one
important aspect of it, were less qualified for
entering on the controversy they raised and
maintained than these men, although their
judgment was, and in some measure is, received
by the British public as the announcements of
an oracle. Strange that so much weight should
be attached to the criticisms of men on a lan-
guage and a literature, of which language and
literature they were totally ignorant, except
through the medium of a translation, and who
had not even the qualification of being, in any
measure worth speaking of, acquainted with the
character and habits of thought of the people
whose language and' literature they were criti-
cising. Yet it was so, and in perfect accordance
mth this is the fact still existing, that this kind
of ignorance is thought to be no disqualification
for the exercise of criticism in the same direction
— rather the reverse. It would be interesting to
know how much weight the literati of continen-
tal Europe w^ould be disposed to attach to the
speculations of that man on the subject of the Ian-