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

PREFACE. X7
The rest of this preface is intended to answer
Doctor Samuel Johnson, and Mr. Malcohii Laing,
the Doctor's disciple, and oce of the greatest
champions that ever started against the authenti-
city of Ossians poems. We must beg the indul-
gence of our readers, while we follow them both
through the mazes which they tre^d. To ascertain
such an important point in the history of litera-
ture, must be an object highly interesting to every
reader.
If the dispute betwixt James JM'Pherson, Esq,
and Dr. Samuel Johnson, had been concerning
manuscripts brought from a distant or unknown
region, with which we had no intercourse; or con-
cerning a translation from the Asiatic or American
language, which scarce any body understood,
suspicions might naturalfy have arisen, and an au-
thor's assertion been anxiously and scrupulous-
ly weighed. But in the case of a literal trans-
lation, professed to be given of old traditionary
poems of our own country; of poems asserted to
be known in the original to many thousand inha-
bitants of Great Britain, and illustrated too by
many of their tales and current stories concerning
them, such extreme scepticism is altogether out of
place. For who would have been either so hardy,
or so stupid, as to attempt a fraud which could
not have failed of being immediately detected?
Either the author must have had the influence to
engage, as confederates in the fraud, all the natives