Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian > Volume 1

POEMS OF OSSIAN. XlX
cient language of their nation, they contented
themsclyes Avith copying from one another, and
retailing the same fictions, in a new colour and
dress.
John Fordun was the first who collected those
fragments of the Scots history, which had escaped
the brutal policy of Edward I. and reduced them
into order. His accounts, in so far as they con-
cerned recent transactions, deserved credit : be-
yond a certain period, they were fabulous and un-
satisfactory. Some time before Fordun wrote,
the king 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 preju-
dice 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
iu Scotland, he had recourse 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
iiadon in Europe. It was from them he took
tliose improbable ficijons, which form the first
. part of his history.^
The writers that succeeded Fordun implicitly
foliov.ed his system, though they sometimes varied
from him in their relations of particular transac-
tions and the order of succession of their kings.
As they had no new lights, and were, equally
with him, unacquainted with the traditions of their ,
country, their histories contain little information
concerning the origin of the Scots. Even Bucha-
nan himself, except the elegance and vigour of
ills style, has very little to recommend him.