In many instances
he could give a clearer and a higher genealogy to his horse. But that
which Time herself would spare, the critic and the historian would
demolish. The northern barbarians are accused of an exterminating
hostility to learning. It never was half so bitter as the warfare which
learning displays against everything of which she herself is not the
author. A living historian has denied that the poems of Ossian had any
existence save in the conceptions of Macpherson, because he
condescendingly informs us, "Before the invention or introduction of
letters, human memory is incapable of any faithful record which may be
transmitted from age to age."
The account which Macpherson gave may be a fiction, but it is admitted
by those who know the native Scotch and Irish tongues, and have dwelt
where no other language is spoken, that there are poems which have been
transmitted from generation to generation (orally it must be, since
letters are either entirely unknown or are comparatively of recent
introduction), the machinery of which prove them to have been invented
about the time when Christianity was first preached in these islands.
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