his own? It was easy enough either to remedy or
explain it, if he could explain it, or not to introduce it. On the other
hand, when rightly understood, there is no undue exaggeration in the
account at all--not more than might be reasonably expected from a poet
of the highest sensibility and the most vivid imagination in describing
an incomprehensible natural phenomenon; not more, for example, than in
"the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words" on Mount Sinai. Still it
is not the question of descriptive exaggeration, but of scientific fact,
that is now before us; and if the whole of the so-called conflict of
Fingal with the Prince of the Power of the Air on Roraheid in Hoy was so
utterly inexplicable to Macpherson, both as to place and character, that
he speaks of it hopelessly as a story "concerning ghosts," on what
principle of critical consistency, or of common sense, can he be said to
have been the author of it? If the Septuagint translators, for example,
had added a note of their own on the giving of the Law at Sinai, to the
effect that it appeared "the most extravagant fiction" to them, at the
same time transferring, in defiance of their own text, the entire scene
from one end of the Red Sea to the other, would any reader in his senses
accuse the Seventy of having fabricated not only the two chapters in
question, but the whole Book of Exodus--even although the original had
been now lost? Their very simplicity and ignorance would have acquitted
them. Yet Macpherson, in 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 mor