Ossian Collection > Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, appointed to inquire into the nature and authenticity of the poems of Ossian

LETTERS TO DR. BLAIR. 10
myself ; yet the elder Clanranald declared, before another
clergyman and myself, that he had himself transcribed
above one hundred pages of a large ancient manuscript
which treated of the wars of Fingal and Comhal his fa-
ther ; which manuscript has been carried over to Ireland
some time ago by a worthless person, in a clandestine man-
ner, and is now, it is thought, irrecoverably lost ; but the
transcript, he directed Mr Macpherson, when on his tour
through the Highlands, to recover out of the hands of one
Donald M'Donald, late merchant in the Luckenbooths,
Edinburgh, who had got it, though not from Clanranald,
with a view to publish it along with some other Gaelic
pieces.
Mr M'Donald of Demisdale, a parishioner of mine,
declared before me that he remembers to have seen and
read, a considerable part of the said ancient manuscript ;
and rehearsed from memory, before me, some passages of it
that agreed exactly with the translation, viz. the terms of
peace proposed by Morla in Swaran's name to Cuchullin ;
Fing. Book ii. p. 2(3. Likewise, Fingal's orders for raising
his standards, his orders to his chiefs before the battle, the
chiefs resolutions thereupon of fighting each of them a
Lochlin chief; contained in pages 57 and 58 of Fingal,
book iv. Pie concluded with rehearsing the description of
the single combat between Fingal and Swaran, which in
the original is expressed in the strongest language, and per-
fectly agreed with the translation, which is very just here
and in all the other places I had occasion to compare. The
passage alluded to, is Fingal, book v. page 62.
The next I examined was one Archibald M'Lellan,
likewise a parishioner of mine, who repeated before me, in
Gaelic, Ossian's account of his own courtship of Everal-
lin at the lake of. Lego, without any material variation
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