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 mediaeval 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 d