Ossian Collection > Genuine remains of Ossian

PRELIMINARY DISSERTATION. 21
The following passage from Clark will give a good idea
of Shaw's mode of proceeding : — " The next thing which
offers itself to our consideration, is manuscripts. 'Why
not produce and publish the manuscripts ? ' is the constant
cry through every page ; yet, if the whole were produced
and published, our author gives us to understand, he would
consider them only as translations from the English.
" When I produce the originals, in my own handwriting,
taken down from the mouths of illiterate countrymen who
rehearse them, Mr Shaw answers, that I have translated
them from the English, and read them to those persons,
until they have learned to repeat poems of great length,
and without one word of variation. When these persons
offer to swear that they could repeat those poems twenty
years before I was born, Mr Shaw replies, that they are
/Scotchmen, and that their oaths deserve no regard ; ' for a
respectable minister (p. 81) offers to produce as many wit-
nesses as Mr Shaw pleases, to swear to a falsehood, know-
i)u/ it to be such;' and ' another gentleman (p. 87) offers
to swear to a falsehood.' If I send to a hundred persons,
in the most remote corners of the isles, who have never
been within a hundred miles of me, and they rehearse these
poems to any person appointed to hear them, Mr Shaw will
say that there has been a collusion, and that no Scotchman,
except himself, can be believed."
Mr Clark declares he never heard Fingal and Timora
repeated by any single Highlander as they were published ;
but that he had frequently heard every passage recited by
different persons, with no more variation from the transla-
tion than what the genius of the language required, and
not near so much as there was between different editions,
lie could aver that they were familiar to the Highlanders,
though not in the order in which Macpherson had arranged
them ; but that they divided them into as many different
nuieii displeased and surprised at seeing what had been done ! It could not
of course be possibly remedied.