This last is a copy of the Gaelic text contained in Sir John Sinclair’s magnificent edition of Ossian. It was printed at the expense of Sir J. Macgregor Murray and other gentlemen that it might be distributed among the Highlanders to cultivate and to preserve their old chivalrous spirit. There was a copy sent for the use of every parish school in the Highlands. These copies were addressed to the care of the parish ministers, in whose hands they generally remained. One thing is certain, they never reached nor became known amongst the people in the manner in which other books circulated amongst them. Here were the Gaelic originals of Ossian at last; and certainly there was no great reason to regret the delay in their appearance, when they were now presented in so splendid a dress. Surely now all controversy about them should cease for ever. All Gaelic-speaking Highlanders thought so then; and there are many who think similarly still. This text was not exactly as it came from Macpherson’s hands, who died while preparing it for the press. A standard of Celtic orthography was then in course of formation; and John Mackenzie, Esq., of London, one of Macpherson’s executors, engaged the Rev. Dr Thomas Ross to write out with him the text of Ossian in the style adopted by the excellent translators of the Gaelic Bible. Dr Ross, although well acquainted with the language, was not the most accurate scholar of his day. So until Clerk’s “Ossian” appeared in 1870 there was no fairly correct and scholarly text of these poems. Had the text come from Macpherson’s own hands, the orthography would probably have been very different. Macpherson enjoyed neither the time nor the practice in writing the language to enable him to write either consistently with himself or with any system of orthography. What he wrote, or took down, or copied at an earlier period, of which we have a fair specimen in the 7th Book of “Temora,” published with the translations, is like what many educated Highlanders of the present day would write. When conducting Highland periodicals, the writer frequently received articles from gentlemen with some reputation for Gaelic scholarship which were much in the style of Macpherson’s orthography. Yet these same gentlemen might be, as some of them were, profoundly acquainted with the vocabulary and idioms of the language, although they were unable to write consistently with their own or any other mode of spelling; and were they poets of first-class genius, they could produce, as far as acquaintance with the language was concerned, poetry like that of Ossian, Macdonald, or Macintyre, the last of whom could not write at all; whilst it will not be seriously contended that Ossian was so familiar with the pen as he was ever with the sword. The state of the text at any time since it was first moulded in Macpherson’s hands could not be of the slightest value in deciding the age of the poems. Neither could it be of more service