the moon, the breeze mourning alone in the desert, the battles and friendships of his far-off youth, and the flight of the "dark-brown years." These poems are wonderful transcripts of Hebridean scenery. They are as full of mists as the Hebridean glens themselves. Ossian seeks his images in the vapoury wraiths. Take the following of two chiefs parted by their king:--"They sink from their king on either side, like two columns of morning mist when the sun rises between them on his glittering rocks. Dark is their rolling on either side, each towards its reedy pool." You cannot help admiring the image; and I saw the misty circumstance this very morning when the kingly sun struck the earth with his golden spear, and the cloven mists rolled backwards to their pools like guilty things. That a large body of poetical MSS. existed in the Highlands we know; we know also that, when challenged to do so, Macpherson produced his originals; and the question arises, Was Macpherson a competent and faithful translator of these MSS.? Did he reproduce the original in all its strength and sharpness? On the whole, perhaps Macpherson translated the ancient Highland poems as faithfully as Pope translated Homer, but his version is in many respects defective and untrue. The English Ossian is Macpherson's, just as the most popular English Iliad is Pope's. Macpherson was not a thoroughly-equipped Gaelic scholar; his version is full of blunders and misapprehensions of meaning, and he expressed himself in the fashionable poetic verbiage of his day. You find echoes of Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, and Dryden, and these echoes give his whole performance a hybrid aspect. It has a particoloured look; is a thing of odds and ends, of shreds and patches; in it antiquity and his own day are incongruously mixed--like Macbeth in a periwig, or a ruin decked out with new and garish banners. Here is Macpherson's version of a portion of the third book of Fingal:-- "Fingal beheld the son of Starno: he remembered Agandecca. For Swaran with the tears of youth had mourned his white-bosomed sister. He sent Ullin of Songs to bid him to the feast of shells. For pleasant on Fingal's soul returned the memory of the first of his loves!