similar circumstances, is to be held guilty, although he could have more easily cleared himself by altering or omitting the whole passage, than a man in London could prove by an alibi that he had been guilty of no forgery at Inverness or Edinburgh six hours before! But if this hitherto incomprehensible passage in Ossian be genuine then the entire poem of Carric-Thura, which is identified with it in every word and syllable from beginning to end, must be genuine also.

In the same sort of field, but without the addition of supernatural agency, we have another scene of scientific import in the War of Inisthona. Inisthona, according to Macpherson, was on the coast of Norway—he did not know where; Inisthona, according to Laing, was a wilful corruption of Inis-owen in Lough Foyle; Inisthona, in point of fact, was Iceland—as clearly and distinctly so in Macpherson's own text, as latitude, longitude, and physical configuration can make it; far more distinctly recognisable than any Ultima Thule of the Romans. But here, in this Inisthona, we have first a fountain surrounded with mossy stones, in a grassy vale, at the head of a bay; then a wilderness of half a day's journey inland; then a lake at the end of the wilderness, exhaling pestilential vapours, called Lake Lano—but no volcano visible as yet: and in Iceland we have still the basin of the fountain, surrounded with its mossy stones, petrified and dried up by volcanic heat, at the head of the bay; we have still the dreary wilderness beyond it, now scorched and blackened, ending in the Plain of Thingvalla, where the King of Denmark was entertained more than a twelvemonth ago; we have still the lake beyond that, where it should be, but now relieved of its sulphurous vapours by eruptive jets of steam in its neighbourhood; and besides, we have now Mount Hecla in active operation, by whose accumulated fires and dreadful discharges, since Ossian's day, the whole island has been torn and desolated. Here, therefore, again, the same question of fact arises, and must be disposed of by all reasonable inquirers. In this one identification we have geography, geology, history, and navigation combined, beyond Macpherson's own comprehension—earthquakes, subterranean fires, latent volcanic forces; a beautiful island where there is now desolation; and a warlike people occupying its soil, subject to the Danes 600 years and more before the Danes themselves are supposed to have discovered it. In the face of such a revelation as this, nowhere else to be found but in Ossian, what does it signify that the Gaelic text of Inisthona has perished? The fact that it survives in English is only a greater miracle, for which we are indebted solely to the patience and fidelity of a man who has been called a liar and an impostor.

One more miracle has yet to be added in the same field—viz., that Lake Lego or Lough Neagh in Ireland, and Lake Lano in Iceland, both emitting pestilential vapours, are geographically connected in Ossian with subterranean volcanic movements which pass from Ireland, by the west coast of Scotland, through the Orkneys to Inisthona; and thus the latest theories of the most accomplished geologists have been anticipated more than a hundred years before their announcement, by the work of a man who is supposed to have had no original to guide him, and who himself had not the remotest idea of what his own words conveyed.

It remains then, after such illustrations, for those who still deny the authenticity of Ossian to declare whether they have ever studied him; and for those who still wrangle about the style of Macpherson's so-called Gaelic to decide whether they will continue such petty warfare among vowels and consonants, and ill-spelt mediæval legends, when the science, the history, the navigation, the atmospheric phenomena, and the impending volcanic changes of Western Europe fifteen hundred years ago, are all unveiled and detailed, with an accuracy and a minuteness beyond cavil or competition, in the matchless English translation before them. Will our most erudite grammarians never understand? Would they abandon Genesis, shall we say, because Elohim and Jehovah are sometimes interchanged in the text? Can they believe that any Jew, who could concoct a book like Genesis, did not also know that Elohim was a plural noun? Can they any more, then, believe that a Celtic man with brains enough to fabricate poems like Fingal and Temora did not know that the Gaelic name for the sun was feminine? Can they see no other way of accounting for such alleged variations of gender, and number, and case, than by forgery, when the very forger himself must have seen them? Or do they seriously prefer some letter of the Gaelic alphabet to a law of nature? Will they forego the facts of an epoch, for the orthography of a syllable? If so, then the friends of Ossian, who is one great mass of facts, must turn once more to the common sense of the public, and leave his etymological detractors at leisure to indulge their own predilections, and to entertain one another.

In the present aspect of the controversy, indeed, the only antagonists entitled to anything like a patient hearing are the respectable, perhaps venerable, geologists and antiquarians who still lodge or linger about the Roman Wall; who talk, with a solemn air, about stern facts; who are also fortified by the authority of Hugh Miller and Smith of Jordanhill, and are led on to continuous defeat on their own ground, under the auspices of the Scotsman, who knows well how to shut the door politely in any man's face who pursues them. These gentlemen are far from being either unimportant or unworthy antagonists, if they would only speak intelligently for themselves and not allow their credit to be usurped by some nameless reviewer in a newspaper, who may know less about the whole matter in dispute than they do about Sanscrit. But let them have patience. Their favourite haunts, and impregnable strongholds, about Dunglass and Duntocher, shall be investigated with religious care; and the waters of the Clyde, as high as they will honestly flow, let in upon them without ceremony or remorse. As for the others, who, with no great semblance of either grace or grammar to support them, persist in affirming, with point-blank stolid effrontery, that Macpherson "must have been an impostor," and that Ossian is a "fudge"—they may safely be consigned in silence to their legitimate fate.

P. HATELY WADDELL.

(To be Concluded in our next.)

TO PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE.

A LOCHABER LILT.