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

PUBLISHED AND TRADITIONAL. 201
is more beautiful. In the course of a conversation lately
with a gentleman of no mean authority, on the Ossianic
controversy, he expressed his surprise that the anti-
Ossianics would use such futile arguments as that Mac-
Pherson was the author of these poems, or that the
people get them from books, while he himself had a
distinct recollection of hearing one Rory M'Queen,
commonly called Ruairi Ruadh, who was a catechist in
this parish, recite poems which can be found in Mac-
Pherson's. This M'Queen died about thirty years ago
at the advanced age of eighty. He had a great many
of Ossian's poems which he learned when a boy by
hearsay, and with which he afterwards used to entertain
his hosts when Ravelling from village to village on his
catechetical visits. A niece of his, who now resides at
Paible, North Uist, has the same hereditary talent which
procured her uncle more celebrity than his catechetical
acumen. This MacQueen was no less than fifty years
of age when MacPherson's Gaelic was published, and
fifty-seven before Stewart's, or M'Callum's appeared. In
whatever way, therefore, people came to have these
poems, it is a well-known fact that they never got them
from books, for nothing can be more patent than the
fact that these poems existed long before MacPherson's,
or Stewart's, or M'Callum's, or Gillies', or Miss Brookes'
came into existence. Nor is it consistent to suppose that
MacPherson, were he really the author of the poems,
would give them unto the world as the composition of
Ossian, while they were of themselves sufficient to raise
him to the pinnacle of fame, and establish his name as
the greatest poet that Scotland ever produced. I do
not believe, however, that these minor pieces are the
composition of Ossian. They differ as much from them
as a school-boy's attempts at painting do from the