Ossian Collection > Original collection of the poems of Ossian, Orrann, Ulin, and other bards, who flourished in the same age

Ivlii PREFACE.
tells US, only found a few trifling poems, and,
therefore, no more were to be found.
Whether such testimonies are to be preferred
to these learned and respectable men, living on
the spot, and conversant with the language and
antiquities, we leave our readers to judge. That
such inquirers as Mr. Laing mentions, should
have found poems, would certainly have been a
matter of surprise.
We are now come to that argument which Mr.
Laing had already expatiated upon in the third
volume of his history, and which he reckoned al-
together decisive, independent of any other.
From the manners and customs of the age in
which Ossian is said to have lived, he accounts it
impossible that the poems attributed to him,
could have been then produced. Mr. Laing's as-
sertion, with regard to the horrible barbarity of
the Highlanders in the third century, are, indeed,
sufficiently positive; but had betaken the trouble
to enquire into the ancient manners and state of
that people, he would not have been put to the mi-
serable shift of quoting what Dr. Johnson, in his
tour, says of their manners a hundred years ago,
to prove his own assertions, with regard to their
situation fourteen hundred years prior to that pe-
riod. The impossibility that the sentiments and
manners described in Ossian s Poems, could have
belonged to the Highlanders of the third century,
Mr. Laing deduces from his ideas of the manners