OSSIAN AND THE CLYDE, FINGAL IN IRELAND, OSCAR IN ICELAND, OR OSSIAN HISTORICAL AND AUTHENTIC, by P. Hately Waddell, LL.D., Minister of the Gospel, Editor and Biographer of Robert Burns, Translator of the Psalms into Scottish, &c. Glasgow: James Maclehose, Publisher to the University, 1875.

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.

The historical and critical value of this book, and the change it will effect not only on the Ossianic literature, but on the poems themselves, may easily be seen in three ways at least. First, the importance of the question discussed, the universal character of the poems, and the historical results depending on the decision of their authenticity are now clearly set forth. It has been the prevalent, if not the only way of examining these works, to regard them merely as interesting literary productions, relics of ancient poetry or modern frauds, and to determine their truth or falsity, as the case might be, by such tests as the character of the translator, the means of preserving and collecting such poems, and especially the form of the language found in them. These were the only grounds of criticism. Nor did even their most ardent supporters seem to see much higher results involved than the recognition of some early national songs and ballads, or the preservation of the oldest Celtic literature of the country. To them it was an interesting and important discussion in this light only; the history contained in these songs they either did not understand, or entirely neglected. It has been reserved for the author of this book to shew, beyond dispute or doubt, that the poems of Ossian are not on the one side merely grand romances or national myths, or on the other only curious literary deceptions; they are tales of history, grand and romantic certainly, but unreal or deceptive never; annals of war and songs of love for Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and Denmark; lives of these countries' heroes, pictures of their lands. And though more may yet be discovered, and stranger things be proved, this at least—the early history of these nations with their lawgivers, kings, and emperors, Scotch and Roman, Celt and Saxon; with their wars and works, their public acts and private life, their religion, their customs, their trade; their moors and glens and streams, their Roman walls and battlefields—this, and nothing less than this, is Ossian; in interest and importance coming close beside Homer, both as historian and poet, and leaving Junius, Chatterton, the German "EpistolÆ," &c., far, far behind:—

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. And by whom? By a Southern Scot—an actual "Son of the Stranger"—who examined, and who discusses, the question purely on its merits; and who is proof against the charges of narrow Highland bigotry and prejudice, which would have been so effectively hurled against a native of "Tir nam beann nan gleann's nan gaisgeach" by other Southerners who never expended a single moment in a personal study of the question, but accepted their opinions and conclusions second hand.

The most important matter however, in this volume, and which alone rendered the foregoing results possible, is the method pursued. It is upon this that all else is based, and without which Ossian would still have remained the inexplicable enigma he not long ago really was; for not all the criticism which has been lavished on this ancient and immortal bard by professors, philologists, and philosophers, has rendered him one whit more clear or perspicuous, but has certainly raised discussion and animosity enough between the opposing combatants. And the reason is, that no man yet has got farther in his analysis than the mere words and letters of the text, their various spelling or combinations, their ancient or modern use, their Celtic or Saxon origin, their gender, number, and case. Philology is, has been, and will always be a useful and most important science beyond many others; but philology may be, and has often been, shamefully abused and mocked. The "dry light" of truth and certainty for which everybody is toiling and labouring in art, religion, philosophy, and literature, is concealed by more than the darkness of printers' types in mere verbal criticism—the most popular, but perhaps the most pernicious habit of the day. The form of the poetry in Ossian, apart from all its spirit and substance, has long been analysed, investigated, discussed, destroyed, and built up again; yielding all the fruit it seems likely ever to yield, more doubt and more discussion; tense-endings and inflections have been tried and found wanting.

The method we now speak of has abandoned all such criticism, or, at least, made it entirely subservient to a higher and more comprehensive one; and has brought into the darkness of the Ossianic controversy a revelation bright as noonday. The spirit of the poems has been taken instead of the letter, the contents instead of the words, the geography of Scotland as it stands instead of inflections, and the history of our own and of other nations has been substituted for emendations and various readings. And by this means a work has been done for the Highlands, for Scotland and for Europe, which can scarcely be realised; the history of Scotland, and with it the history of a great part of Europe in some of its darkest ages, has been revealed, and the literature of our country saved. Nor does the man who has done this need thanks, although, at the hands of all, and especially of Highlanders, he certainly deserves them. The work is its own reward.

We shall now come more to details and give some examples of the way in which Dr Waddell conducts his investigations, and of the discoveries which follow from them in the region of geography alone. For the convincing identification, however, of the places named, we must refer the reader to the book itself.

Dr Waddell seems to have been a believer, from his youth, in the authenticity of Ossian by what he calls moral instinct, founded merely on the characteristics of Macpherson's text—its simplicity, sublimity, and coherence. Judging of it by these attributes alone, he could never doubt it; and from this, the next step was easy and indeed necessary—if Ossian in his opinion was thus authentically true, Ossian ought also to be historically and geographically true; and therefore the whole, or at least the principal, object of his investigation has been to declare that truth by demonstrating the actual correspondence of nature to the letter of the translation, even where Macpherson himself had never seen it. And this undeniable fact, the ignorance of the translator as to the whereabouts of the places accurately described in his own text, is one of the strongest proofs he makes use of. This interesting method seems to have been suggested to him first by discoveries in the island of Arran, where the tomb of Ossian, and the graves of Fingal, Oscar, and Malvina were pointed out to him by the people, and authenticated by tradition. On examining all the allusions in the translation, they were found exactly to confirm the identity of these places; yet Macpherson never was in Arran. Next, Dr Waddell proceeded to examine the whole Frith of Clyde, where equally distinct proofs awaited him. He shews that the Clyde must have been a fiord to Rutherglen and Bothwell in Ossian's day, and that Balclutha must have been identical with Castlemilk, or some other ruined fortress near Rutherglen, and not as commonly supposed, with Dunglass or Dumbarton. The Kelvin, both in name and character is the Colavain of Ossian, and was a fiord up to Kilsyth; near which he discovers the actual scene of Comala's death, and of the triumph of Oscar over Carausius, a little to the east. Here too, Macpherson was completely at fault. In the north of Ireland, from the descriptive text of Fingal and Temora, the valley of the Six-Mile-Water is found to correspond in the most minute particulars with the scenes of these poems, whereas Macpherson by mere guess-work placed them much farther south and west. In the Orkney Islands, by a similar process of minute verification, he finds Carricthura at Castle Thuroe in Hoy; and the celebrated scene of Fingal's encounter with Loda, near the well-known Dwarfie Stone on the west coast of that island. In Iceland, by a most irrefragable demonstration, he identifies the dried-up fountain at Reikum with the "fount of the mossy stones," and the plain of Thingvalla with the plain of the pestiferous Lano—both in the War of Inisthona.

Now the only, and to many the great, difficulty in the way of accepting such proof in its entirety, is the boldness of the author's assumption that the Frith of Clyde must have been from seventy to eighty feet higher in Ossian's era—that is, in the time of the Romans—than it now is; but if this be proved it adds another conclusive proof to the authenticity of Ossian, for Macpherson was ignorant likewise of this. The possibility of such a fact has already been loudly challenged by a scientific reviewer in the Scotsman, whose objections, however, have been conclusively answered by Dr Waddell in the same paper, and in the last three numbers of the Celtic Magazine; indeed the exquisite photographic views in the work of the actual marine formations on the Clyde, and the sectional views of the coast at other points, leave no room for serious doubt on the subject.

Besides all this, Dr Waddell adds a critical dissertation on Macpherson's text, to shew the impossibility of his having tampered with the original, illustrating this part of his argument by references to Berrathon, Croma, and Conlath and Cuthona. He has also introduced an interesting statistical summary, gathered from Ossian, of the manners, customs, religious observances, and scientific knowledge of the age; which may be studied with much benefit. In the appendix we have a curious history of the Irish people from the earliest traditional dates down to the time of Ossian, compiled from reliable chronicles, hitherto, we suspect, very little known; the whole book being illustrated by many beautiful wood-cuts and original maps. The exquisite little poem which completes the work we cannot omit:—

TO GOATFELL, ARRAN:

ON FIRST SEEING IT FROM THE SHORE.

[AT BRODICK.]

We are glad to find that the Queen's Book—"Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands"—will soon appear in Gaelic. The translation is by the Rev. John Patrick St Clair, St Stephen's, Perth, who is an excellent scholar, with a deep-rooted love for his Gaelic vernacular. This news cannot but be gratifying to the patriotic Highlander all over the world, who has ever been loyal to Her Majesty, as a descendant of the Stuarts; and especially should a work be welcome, in our native language, in which the highest in the realm describes the Highlander as "one of a race of peculiar independence and elevated feeling." What has become of the Highland Society's Translation entrusted to the late Mr Macpherson?