O, Johnson, Pinkerton, Macaulay, and the rest--to say that this was all bombast and a lie! But you knew nothing of Arran: you never traversed the vale of Shisken, nor surveyed its monuments, nor considered its geography; nor heard the rustle of the winds, in your imagination, among its prostrate woods; nor glanced on the surge of its departed lake, nor compared its traditions with the text of Ossian; yet neither did Macpherson, whom you have accused of falsehood and forgery; he was equally ignorant of it all. How strange you now look confronted with him thus; how strange he himself looks, in the bewilderment of unexpected victory at the grave of Oscar and by the tomb of Malvina; with the ghosts of fifteen hundred years ago, awoke from the dead, to enlighten and convict you--yourselves now ghosts, like them--in the pride of your unbelief!... Even the possibility of reply is foreclosed, by the verdict of the whole landscape around you. The earth, the water, the wind and very clouds are agreed about it. The sunbeam from the east, beyond the grave at Glenree there, glances golden rebuke on your dull culumnies, and the ebbing fiord of Sliddery carries your vaunted authority to sea. The fine-drawn light which shimmers thus, through so many centuries, on fallen forests, wasted lakes, and mouldering dead dispels the last obstruction of your scorn--and our controversy with you is ended. But still further, these poems assume a new form, and a peculiar interest in being now by Dr Waddell harmonized and united into one grand series, linked together in a continuous chain. They are no longer detached fragments, doubtful and incomprehensible myths, unknown and unanalysable; they have unity now, the unity which belongs to the works of one universal poet, as well the unity of history. Such an analysis and conception of these works has never before been attempted. A critic here and there has examined and partially explained one or two pieces, as separate poems, but always imperfectly and with hesitation; afraid evidently of his conclusions, not yet having discovered the clue to this labyrinth of song. Nor can we wonder that critics and commentators should hesitate to tread upon ground where the translator himself was at fault; for, however faithfully he compared and considered, he did not understand the geography of Ossian. He gathered the poems as fragments, and fragments they remained to him; for though he might strive hard to explain and connect them, yet while he had little idea of the places described it was impossible he could succeed; they are all descriptive poems, and require to be localised. This formerly confused mass of Highland and Irish tradition and geography Dr Waddell has fearlessly attacked and completely mastered, the unexplored land has all been surveyed and cleared up, and the truth and harmony of the Ossianic poems demonstrated.