Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian

th« Poems of Ossian, 21
pasture, they were free from that toil and business
which engross the attention of a commercial peo-
ple. Their amusement consisted in hearing or re-
peating their songs and traditions, and these en-
tirely turned on the antiquity of their nation and
the exploits of their forefathers. It is no wonder,
therefore, that there are more remains of antiquity
among them than among any other people in
Europe. Traditions, however, concerning remote
periods, are only to be regarded in so far as they
coincide with contemporary writers of undoubted
credit and veracity.
No writers began their accounts from a more
parly period than the hislorians of the Scots nation.
Without records, or even tradition itself, they givg
li long list of ancient kings and a detail of theii
transactions with a scrupulous exactness. One
might naturally suppose, that when they had no
authentic annals they should, at least, have re-
course to the traditions of their country, and have
reduced them into a regular system of history. Of
both they seem to have been equally destitute.
Born in the low country and strangers to the an-
cient language of their nation, they contented them-
selves with copying from one another and retail-
ing the same fictions in a new colour and dress.
John Fordun was the first who collected those
fragments of the Scots history, which had escaped
the brutal policy of Edward I., and reduced them
into order. His accounts, in so far as they con-
cerned recent transactions, deserved credit; beyond
a certain period they were fabulous and unsatis-
factory. Some time before Fordun wrote, the
king of England in a letter to the Pope, had run
up the antiquity of his nation to a very remote
sera. Fordun, possessed of all the national preju-
dice of the age, was tmwilling that his country
sliould yield in point of antiquity to a people then
ita rivals and euemies. Destitute of annals in