WE cannot, after careful study of this book, assign to it any but the first place in Ossianic literature. In style of composition it is pure, dignified and eloquent; in substance and matter it surpasses beyond reach of comparison any book hitherto written on the same subject. It can scarcely be doubted, indeed, that this great work has rescued a discussion which even in the highest hands seemed descending to mere verbal quibbles and party abuse from such a degradation, and has raised it to a position, which if it ever held before, it was rapidly losing. The subject is now made universal; it enters on a new life, strengthened with a new element which will never now be overlooked. A culminating point has been reached for all preceding criticism, and a sure foundation has been laid for a new school of investigation, other and higher than the dogmatism of Johnson, Laing, or Macaulay. We know not how far these men were able to comprehend and appreciate such pure and unique creations as those of Ossian, but it is to be attributed neither to their refined and cultivated taste, to their critical discernment, nor yet to their historical and literary knowledge that they despised and abandoned, as mere myths of savage tribes or wholesale fabrications of a modern literateur, the poetic annals of their own land and the grand historical epics where the actions of Norsemen, Scots, and Romans alike, are pourtrayed and immortalised. Now, however, these works stand on a new footing; comprehensible, beautiful, and historical every one, deserving more than ever the enthusiastic admiration with which all nations have received them, for now it can be based on reason and knowledge.