To English readers the sun of Ossian shines dimly through a mist of verbiage. It is to be hoped that the mist will one day be removed--it is the bounden duty of one of Ossian's learned countrymen to remove it. It is not to be supposed that the Ossianic legends are repeated often now around the island peat-fires; but many are told resembling in essentials those which Dr Dasent has translated to us from the Norse. As the northern nations have a common flora, so they have a common legendary literature. Supernaturalism belongs to their tales as the aurora borealis belongs to their skies. [Sidenote: Skye legends.] Those stories I have heard in Skye, and many others, springing from the same roots, I have had related to me in the Lowlands and in Ireland. They are full of witches and wizards; of great wild giants crying out, "Hiv! Haw Hoagraich! It is a drink of thy blood that quenches my thirst this night;" of wonderful castles with turrets and banqueting halls; of magic spells, and the souls of men and women dolefully imprisoned in shapes of beast and bird. As tales few of them can be considered perfect; the supernatural element is strong in many, but frequently it breaks down under some prosaic or ludicrous circumstance: the spell exhales somehow, and you care not to read further. Now and then a spiritual and ghastly imagination passes into a revolting familiarity and destroys itself. In these stories all times and conditions of life are curiously mixed, and this mixture shows the passage of the story from tongue to tongue through generations. If you discover on the bleak Skye shore a log of wood with Indian carvings peeping through a crust of native barnacles, it needs no prophet to see that it has crossed the Atlantic. Confining your attention merely to Skye--to the place in which the log is found--the Indian carvings are an anachronism; but there is no anachronism when you arrive at the idea that the log belongs to another continent, and that it has reached its final resting-place through blowing winds and tossing waves. These old Highland stories, beginning in antiquity, and quaintly ending with a touch of the present, are lessons in the science of criticism. In a ballad the presence of an anachronism, the cropping out of a comparatively modern touch of manners or detail of dress, does not in the least invalidate the claim of the ballad to antiquity--provided it can be proved that before being committed to writing it had led an oral existence. Every ballad existing in the popular memory takes the colour of the periods through which it has lived, just as a stream takes the colour of the different soils through which it flows. The other year Mr Robert Chambers attempted to throw discredit on the alleged antiquity of Sir Patrick Spens from the following verse:-- "Oh, laith, laith were our guid Scots lords To weet their cork-heel'd shoon; But lang ere a' the play was o'er, They wat their heads abune,"--