THE OSSIANIC POEMS.-THEIR CHARACTER AND
INFLUENCE.-MACPHERSON.
In the middle of the eighteenth century a rumour
went out from Edinburgh that the songs of an
ancient poet, as great as Homer, had been dis-
covered in the Highlands. Fragments of an
heroic strain were, it was said, often to be heard
in the valleys beyond the Grampians, or on the
shores of the Hebrides; telling, in mournful
verse, of the brave deeds of other days, of the
battles of Fingal, a glorious king, and the woes
of Ossian, his son, who was left, old and blind,
to lament the friends of his youth. Those who
were familiar with the barbarous speech of the
country declared that these wild poems were of
singular beauty, and sublime in their pathos ;
tradition assigned them to a dim antiquity; nay,
if report were true, their forlorn author lived at
the time when the Romans invaded the north,
and his words had been handed down on the
lips of the people for fifteen hundred years.