Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian > Volume 1

THE JERA OF OSSIAN. 21
count of the Yncas of Peru. The Peruvians
had lost all other monuments of their history,
and it was from ancient poems, which his
mother, a princess of the blood of the Yncas,
taught him in his youth, that he collected the
materials of his history. If other nations then,
that had often been overrun by enemies, and
had sent abroad and received colonies, could
for many ages preserve, by oral tradition, their
laws and histories uncorrupted, it is much
more probable that the ancient Scots, a people
so free of intermixture with foreigners, and so
strongly attached to the memory of their an-
cestors, had the works of their baids handed
down with great purity.
What is advanced, iii this short Disserta-
tion, it must be confessed, is mere conjecture.
Beyond the reach of records, is settled a
gloom, which no ingenuity can penetrate.
The manners described, in these poems, suit
the ancient Celtic times, and no other period
that is known in history. We must, therefore,
place the heroes far back in antiquity; and it
matters little, who were their contemporaries
in other parts of the world. If we have placed
Fingal in his proper period, we do honour to
the manners of barbarous times. He exercised
every manly virtue in Caledonia, while Helio
i^abulus disgraced human nature at Rome.