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

PREFACE. Ixvii
ill manuscripts, in the possession of bards and
teachers and their patrons. Great is the labour
of writing by the hand, in comparison of printing,
which shortens and speedily furnishes whatever is
done by it, however great; and great is the blind-
ness, and sinful darkness, and ignorance, of those
who teach, and write, and compose in Gaelic, in
exhibiting much more attention, and showing
more anxiety to preserve the vain, extravagant,
false, and worldly histories of the Tuath-de-Da-
7ians and Milesians — of the heroes of Fins^al, the
son of Comhal — of tlie Fingalians — and of many
others, which I shall not here mention, nor name,
nor attempt to examine." The author, from whom
these extracts are tal.en, died in the year 1-372,
His memory is still preserved, by tradition, in the
parish of Kil martin and in Lorn, where he cl^iefly
resided. The bards to whom he bore no good-
will, made him, in return, the subject of their sa-
tirical verses and invectives.
We have an invincible proof from the preface of
this man, that the bards were no strangers to lite-
rature; and that Ossian's poems and the Finga-
lians were held in great esteem at that period.
Selma, the famous palace of Finga), w^as si-
tuated in that part of Argyleshire called Upper-
Lorn, upon a high eminence of an oblong form,
which, near the sea-shore, rises at equal distances
from the mouths of the lakes Etive and Creran.
On the top of this hill are still to be seen vestiges