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

INTERNAL EVIDENCE, ETC. 141
power, which it is intended to give. MacPherson's
English loses all this, and he was a Badenoch man, who
was not familiar with such scenes.
O Oscar ! bend the strong in arm ;
but spare the feeble hand.
Be thou a stream of many tides
against the foes of thy people ;
but like the gale that moves the grass
to those who ask thine aid.
So Treunmor lived ;
such Trathal was ;
and such has Fingal been.
My arm was the support of the injured ;
the weak rested
behind the lightning of my steel.
(Fingal, bookiii., 1763.)
The Gaelic of 1807 is something quite different
from either of these passages. (Pp. 148, 149, gratis
edition 1818.) Three versions therefore exist — two
printed in Gaelic, and MacPherson's English; and of
these I prefer Staffa's west country Gaelic, with which
MacPherson had nothing to do, and which is not a
translation of the published English, but a far better
version of a similar passage. The Gaelic must surely
be the original in this case.
Again, passages composed on the following principle
must belong to the language in which the assonance
exists, rather than to that which gives the meaning less
forcibly, and nothing more : — ■