Matheson Collection > Popular tales of the west Highlands > Volume 4

22 OSSIAN — IRISH ARGUMENT.
though his patient industry commands the respect of all
who know his history.*
I hold, then, that an unprejudiced man who has
read this Irish argument, must attribute much of the
groundwork of the poems of Ossian to unknown bards
r ir older than MacPherson, but not one line as it
' stands to Ossian, Oisein, or Oisin, if that bard lived
*~ the third century. I doubt if any one old popular
traditional ballad now exists anywhere in the same
words in which it was originally composed, and I think
that this national squabble between England, Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland, Highlands and Lowlands, about
poems which belong to the literature of the whole United
Kingdom, should now cease. It is as if a man should
fall out with himself, rap his own knuckles, tread on
his own toes, punch his own head, bite off his nose to
spite his face, and use his brains and his tongue to per-
suade and summon the rest of the world to help him to
extinguish himself.
The common opinion amongst Lowland Scots is ex-
pressed at the fourth page of Irving's History of Scottish
Poetry, a work of great research, published in 1861 ;
in which it is shewn that lowland authors, of all ages,
have had a fling at Celts and their literature.
"It is no longer pretended that any Gaelic poetry has been
preserved in early manuscripts, and indeed the period when
Gaelic can be traced as a written language is comparatively
modern."
Put the next sentence admits that ancient poems were
preserved in the Highlands of Scotland, and the notes
flatly contradict the text. The Bishop of Clonfert and
* Relics of Welsh Bards, by E. Jones, 3 vols. 4to.