material was reshaped, added to, and altered by the changing spirit and emotion of the Celt. Reading the Ossianic fragments is like visiting the skeleton of one of the South American cities; like walking through the streets of disinterred Pompeii or Herculaneum. These poems, if rude and formless, are touching and venerable as some ruin on the waste, the names of whose builders are unknown: whose towers and walls, although not erected in accordance with the lights of modern architecture, affect the spirit and fire the imagination far more than nobler and more recent piles; its chambers, now roofless to the day, were ages ago tenanted by life and death, joy and sorrow; its walls have been worn and rounded by time, its stones channelled and fretted by the fierce tears of winter rains; on broken arch and battlement every April for centuries has kindled a light of desert flowers; and it stands muffled with ivies, bearded with mosses, and stained with lichens by the suns of forgotten summers. So these songs are in the original--strong, simple, picturesque in decay; in Mr Macpherson's English they are hybrids and mongrels. They resemble the Castle of Dunvegan, an amorphous mass of masonry of every conceivable style of architecture, in which the ninth century jostles the nineteenth. In these poems not only do character and habit smack of the primeval time, but there is extraordinary truth of local colouring. The Iliad is roofed by the liquid softness of an Ionian sky. In the verse of Chaucer there is eternal May and the smell of newly-blossomed English hawthorn hedges. In Ossian, in like manner, the skies are cloudy, there is a tumult of waves on the shore, the wind sings in the pine. This truth of local colouring is a strong argument in proof of authenticity. I for one will never believe that Macpherson was more than a somewhat free translator. Despite Gibbon's sneer, I do "indulge the supposition that Ossian lived and Fingal sung;" and, more than this, it is my belief that these misty phantasmal Ossianic fragments, with their car-borne heroes that come and go like clouds on the wind, their frequent apparitions, the "stars dim-twinkling through their forms," their maidens fair and pale as lunar rainbows, are, in their own literary place, worthy of every recognition. If you think these poems exaggerated, go out at Sligachan and see what wild work the pencil of moonlight makes on a mass of shifting vapour. Does _that_ seem nature or a madman's dream? Look at the billowy clouds rolling off the brow of Blaavin, all golden and on fire with the rising sun! Wordsworth's verse does not more completely mirror the Lake Country than do the poems of Ossian the terrible scenery of the Isles. Grim, and fierce, and dreary as the night-wind is the strain, for not with rose and nightingale had the old bard to do; but with the thistle waving on the ruin, the upright stones that mark the burying-places of heroes, weeping female faces white as sea-foam in