Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian

INTRODUCTORY NOTE xv
characters of the Fenian band no doubt correspond to
the other personages of the Gaelic Olympus. Revert-
ing to the question with which we started—' Did
Fingal live or Ossian sing ' — we have to give the
answer, that Fingal lived and Ossian sang only in
the heart and imagination of the Gaelic race, to
embody their ideal of all that is noble and heroic."
The ordinary English opinion, which blindly and un-
reasoningly follows the lead of a great authority on
many literary matters, though one whose dicta on
Ossianic literature were next to valueless, Dr Johnson,
is: that "The Poems of Ossian," which were published
in 1760, and have since become familiar throughout the
whole world, were composed in English prose by James
Macpherson, and that he was the inventor of the char-
acters and incidents : in a word, that the poems had no
previous existence in any shape.
This, of course, as all our leading specialists are now
agreed, is wholly untenable. As Mr Campbell states,
in the already alluded to essay in his "Popular Tales of
the West Highlands," the groundwork of much that is
in "Ossian" certainly existed in Gaelic in Scotland long
before Macpherson was born. The chief characters
figured in Gaelic compositions centuries ago, and in
Gaelic songs by well-known ancient bards there are so
many allusions to Fionn, the Feinne, Oisin (Ossian), and
the heroes of the Ossianic cycle, that there is absolutely
no standing ground left for this theory.
On the other hand, the patriotic view still held by a
limited number of Scotsmen is that Ossian's poems are
historical ; that the Gaelic is genuine old poetry com-
posed by a bard of the third century, who witnessed
many of the exploits recorded ; and that to all intents
and purposes Macpherson simply gave us, in more or
less sequent narrative, an anglicised version of authentic
traditionary lore.
This extreme view, unfortunately, must now be con-