Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal > Volume 1

IP A DISSERTATION CONCERNING
No writers began their accounts from a more early
period tlian the historians of tlie Scots nation. With-
out records, or even tradition itself, they give a long
list of ancient kings, and a detail of their transactions,
with a scnipulous exactness. One might naturally sup-
pose, that when they had no authentic annals, they
should, at least, have recourse to tlie 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 ancient language of their nation, they contented
themselves with copying from one another, and retail-
ing tJie same fictions in a new colour and dress.
John Fordun was tlie iirst who collected tliose frag-
ments of the Scots history, which had escaped the bru-
tal policy of Edv/ard I. and reduced them into order.
His accounts, in so far as they concerned recent trans-
actions, deserved credit : beyond a certain period, they
were fabulous and unsatisfactory. Some time before .
Fordun wrote, the kmg 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 pre-
judice of the age, was unwilling that his country should
yield, in point of antiquity, to a people then its rivals
and enemies. Destitute of annals in Scodand, he had
recourse to Ireland, v/hich, according to the vulgar
errors of the times, was reckoned the first habitation
of the Scots. He found there, that the Irish bards
had canicd their pretensions to antiquity as high, if
not beyond any nation in Europe. It was from them
he took those improbable fictions which form the first
part of his history.
The writers that succeeded Fordun implicitly fol-
lowed his system, though they sometimes varied from
him in their relations of particular transactions, and
the order of succession of their kings. As they had no
nev/ lights, and were, equally with him, unacquainted
with the traditions of their country, their histories con-
tain litde infjrmatiou concerning the origin of the