Ossian Collection > Essay on the authenticity of the poems of Ossian

OF OSSIAN'S POEMS. 103
idioms ; teach him Latin, or Enghsh, or
French, from that moment his native tongue
becomes contaminated, by what a genuine
Highlander would account barbarisms; he
no longer retains the pure idiom of the Gae-
lic, he unavoidably mixes it with the idioms
of the foreign language which he has acqui-
red.
By those who are not acquainted with some
original language unadulterated by foreign
idioms, it will not, perhaps, be easily under-
stood, that the purity, with which the Gaelic
is spoken by any person, is directly as his
want of acquaintance with every other lan-
guage. An unlettered Highlander will feel
and detect a violation of the idiom of his
language more readily than his countryman,
who has read Homer and Virgil.
■• A ludicrous instance, which will serve to
illustrate this view of the subject, is record-
ed in the Appendix to the Committee's Re-
port, (p. 95.) in the declaration of Ewan Mac-