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

86 OSSIAN — TRADITIONS, WRITINGS, ETC.
afterwards made his famous tour, of which he and
Boswell both published accounts. From these dates,
it seems that Johnson might have seen part of Ossian
in the Strand, printed in Gaelic, if he had been so
minded, ten years before he went to the Highlands ;
and a lot of manuscripts at the publishers' in London
before that.
rs3. A certain Duncan Kennedy collected traditional
poetry in the West Highlands, and named seventeen
of his authorities. The collection is now preserved in
the Advocates' Library, in two bound volumes of manu-
script. One is marked as the only volume given to
Dr. Smith, and contains, besides a number of Gaelic
poems, English arguments and versions of stories, many
of which are quite familiar to me as current traditions
still ; some are given in vol. iii. The name Fingal
is used in the English, but in the Gaelic the name is
Fion or Fionn.
The other volume is better written, and the argu-
ments are in better English. A great many of the poems
are versions of ballads still traditionally preserved.
These are in the usual traditional metre, and consist of
smooth regular quatrains with assonances. Two words
at the end of the second and fourth lines are similar in
sound and quantity, and two somewhere in the middle
of the second and fourth lines agree with the termina-
tions of the preceding lines ; the second with the first,
and the fourth with the third. Thus, in the version of
"Manus," on which poem "Fingal" is supposed to be
founded, Oisein says —
1. A chlerich a chanas na sailm,
2 ( Air learn fein
' | Gur baobh do chial