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

OSSIAN— TRADITIONS, WRITINGS, ETC. 77
MacPherson's first publication appeared, " The Frag-
ments ; '' a second edition was subsequently published,
and these are now rare books.
A Mr. Ewen MacPherson, a schoolmaster, accom-
panied James MacPherson to Skye and the Long
Islands, and gives an account of their journey in his
affidavit (p. 95, H. S. Report). The schoolmaster wrote
down a great many poems attributed to Ossian from
dictation, and his companion took the manuscript away
with him, as also a small manuscript belonging to Clan-
ranald, and an order for a larger manuscript which was
in Edinburgh. The schoolmaster declares his own
conviction that the poems of Ossian are genuine, and
that he had heard them commonly repeated everywhere;
but as there was no Gaelic Fingal published when the
affidavit was made, this does not apply to the publica-
tion of 1807. He had read Fingal in English, and
thought, so well as he could remember, " the substance
of the original," that the translation was " well
executed." Another MacPherson, a residenter at Por-
tree, deponed that his brother, a smith, had given his
namesake a Gaelic quarto manuscript, which contained
poems which the smith could then repeat, and which he
had no doubt were the works of Ossian. But this does
not prove that these were the originals of the transla-
tions ; for as this witness could not write, it is not
probable that he could read English.
The evidence of Mr. Hugh MacDonald, given in
Gaelic, and confirmed by a number of gentlemen of the
Long Island, is also subject to this objection. They all
knew something of Ossian's poems, and believed them
to be genuine, of very great antiquity, distinct from and
superior to all other Gaelic compositions ; but there was
only some published Gaelic, for the poems of Ossian