pon the breath of popular applause. The Editor of the _Reliques_
had indirectly preferred a claim to the praise of invention, by not
concealing that his supplementary labours were considerable! how
selfish his conduct, contrasted with that of the disinterested Gael,
who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become
a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!--Open this
far-famed Book!--I have done so at random, and the beginning of the
_Epic Poem Temora_, in eight Books, presents itself. 'The blue waves
of Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees
shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy
streams. Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The
blue course of a stream is there. On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha.
His spear supports the king; the red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac
rises on his soul with all his ghastly wounds.' Precious memorandums
from the pocket-book of the blind Ossian!

If it be unbecoming, as I acknowledge that for the most part it is, to
speak disrespectfully of Works that have enjoyed for a length of
time a widely-spread reputation, without at the same time producing
irrefragable proofs of their unworthiness, let me be forgiven upon
this occasion.--Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a
mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood
that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of
Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was
spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into
absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work it is exactly
the reverse; everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner
defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,--yet nothing distinct. It
will always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that
the characters never could exist, that the manners are impossible, and
that a dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as
there depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which
Macpherson defied; when, with the steeps of Morven before his eyes, he
could talk so familiarly of his Car-borne heroes;--of Morven, which,
if one may judge from its appearance at the distance of a few miles,
contains scarcely an acre of ground sufficiently accommodating for a
sledge to be trailed along its surface.--Mr. Malcolm Laing has ably
shown that the diction of