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

IkxIv preface.
tions, because the former is more easily retained
than the latter. Even in the present age, when
the memory is less exerted, owing to the aids of
printing and writing, many a school-boy, by the
time he is twelve years old, has committed to me-
mory more than the length of the poems of Os-
«ian. Can they then be supposed an impractica-
ble task to an order of men, who made repetition
their whole study and employment. As to these
poems becoming uninteHigible in a long series of
years, no such thing could happen so long as these
poems were not committed to writing: oral reci-
tations always conform to the pronunciation of the
day, and have not the difficuities and innovations
of orthography to contend with. The same order
iof men who preserved them, and communicated
^hem to their successors in office, or repeated them
daily in the halls of their chieftains, would explain
any word or phrase, which might chance to be-
come obsolete. Indeed poems so regular, and
often repeated, could not, in the very nature of
things, become unintelligible. The task of com-
mitting these poems to memory, is an effort to
wliich even children, in the present age, are ade-»
quate, as we have already shewn; and as to the
language becoming unintelligible, it is a thing
timply impossible, in any great and popular work,
held in such high estimation, and daily repeated
ill every family of the Scottish Gael.
As the Editors offer to the public these ancient