Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal

Tire POEMS OF OSSIAN. 34I
rally suppose, tliat, when they had no authentic annals, tliey sliould,
at least, have recourse 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 ancient language of their notion, they contented
themselves with copying from one another, and retailing the same
fidions, in a new colour and dress.
John Fordun was the first who colle£led those fragments of the
Scots history, which had escaped the brutal policy of Edward 1.
and reduced them into order. His accounts, in so far as they
concerned recent transactions, deserved credit: beyond a certain
period, they were fabulous and unsatisfactory. Some time before
Fordun wrote, the king of England, in a letter to the Pope, had
run up tlic antiquity of his nation to a very remote ^ra. Fordun,
possessed all the national prejudice 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 Scotland, he had re-
course to Ireland, which, according to the vulgar errors of the
times, was reckoned the first habitation of the Scots. He found,
there, that the Irish bards had carried their pretensions to antiquity
as high, if not beyond any nation in Europe. It was from them
lie took those improbable fictions, which form the first part of his
liistory.
The writers that succeeded Fordun implicitly followed his sys-
tem, though they sometimes varied from him in their relations of
particular transactions, and the order of succession of their kings.
As they had no new lights, and were, equally with him, unac-
quainted with the traditions of their country, their histories coo-
tain little information concerning the origin of the Scots. Even
Buchanan himself, except the elegance and vigour of his style, has
very little to recommend him. Blinded with political prejudices,
he seemed more anxious to turn the fictions of his predecessors to
his own purposes, than to detect their misrepresentations, or in-
\-estigate truth amidst the darkness which they had thrown round
it. It therefore appears, that little can be collected from their own
historians, concerning the first migration of the Scots into Britain.
That this island was peopled from Gaul admits of no doubt.
Whether, colonies came afterwards from the north of Europe is a
U u matter