Ossian Collection > Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the nature and authenticity of the poems of Ossian

LETTERS TO DR. BLAIR. 33
Lucan. Covinùs, or Covinarius, seems to have been de-
rived from the word Coffin, in the Teutonic language,
which was a branch of the old Celtic ; and though it was
imported to England very probably bj the Saxons, it is
lost in the Gaelic. Our fathers, who were in use to carry
their dead betwixt two horses to the congregation-house
of all living, called a coffin carhaid, which is the very
"word that Ossian uses every where for a car ; so that
your letter is very expressive of my idea of Cuchullin's
car.
I have just now before me a poetical relation, by Ossian,
of the interview betwixt Fingal and his friends, and Luno
the son of Leven, ivho made the swords of which I sent
you a description in the postscript to my last, in which
Luno is pointed out as a very wild savage, going upon one
leg, with a staff in his hand, clad in a mantle of black
hide, with an apron of the same stuff before him, and his
complexion much of the colour of his garb, skipping off
to his smiddy with the fl^etness of a March wind, and the
bobbing of the hard untanned skin behind him, was the
principal point of view as he flew over every rising ground
before them. Though Caesar had not said, Britanni inte~
riores pellibus sunt vest hi, I know it must have been then
so, as they could only have learned the manufacture of
cloaths and linens, from what they saw among the Ro-
mans, or from strollers from Gaul, who might have been
led to the secret of cloth-making by their neighbourhood
with the "Roman Colony, or with Massilia ; but it seems,
in Caesar's time, few or no experienced manufacturers had
found their way to our country ; yet, in a poem of Os-
sians, whose scene lies in Ireland, (it is no other than his
own courtship with Everallin), I find mention made of the
Belgae and Teutones, though this is omitted bv the trans-
lator. The first came, very probably, fronx the colony of
D