subject to compare, at his leisure, the work of Moses on the top of Mount Sinai and elsewhere, with an Egyptian "rod" in his hand, and the exploits of Fingal in conflict with the Spirit of Loda on the heights of Hoy, with a sword in his hand. There might have been a far-derived and long traditional secret connection between the two, most edifying, or at least most curious, to investigate; or they might both have resulted from that sort of intuition which only the most gifted of any nation enjoy independently, re-appearing again in Franklin, and now familiarised to the world. Let those who doubt, or who differ on this point, satisfy themselves. What we are now concerned to maintain and prove is, that the fact is more than once described by Ossian, in circumstances, in situations, and with instrumentalities, which render the allegation of it at least indubitable. In the case above referred to, for example, Fingal, challenged and assaulted in a thunderstorm by the Spirit of Loda, encounters his antagonist with a sword, on the very verge of a cliff overhanging the Atlantic; and by one or two scientific thrusts, with incredible daring, disarms the cloud, dissipates the storm, and sends his atmospheric adversary shrieking down the wind with such violence that "Innistore shook at the sound; the waves heard it on the deep, and stopped on their course with fear." The scene is described in that well-known passage in _Carric-Thura_, which Macpherson himself characterises as "the most extravagant fiction in all Ossian's poems." Now the question as regards the authenticity or reliability of this very passage, is whether Macpherson understood the meaning of it; what it represented, where the conflict occurred, or how it happened? It has been sufficiently demonstrated elsewhere--in "Ossian and the Clyde," pp. 311-324--that the encounter took place near the celebrated "Dwarfie Stone" on the western headland of Hoy in the Orkneys--a region more remarkable for its sudden electric gatherings and violent atmospheric currents than almost any other in Great Britain, and at that particular spot so much so, that the very scene described in Ossian has been selected by Walter Scott for a similar electrical display in the "Pirate." But of this obvious fact, and of all that is connected with it in his own translation, Macpherson is so ignorant that he not only does not point it out, but does not understand it, and cannot even conjecture where it was. His great antagonist Laing is equally at fault on the subject, and by way of exposing, as he believes, the dishonesty of Macpherson, endeavours to show that in patching up his account Macpherson had mistaken Thurso for Thura. Macpherson, in fact, knew nothing either about Thurso or Thura--even less than Laing did; and it is only in the work above cited that either the scene has been identified, or the encounter explained.