As good as is the high heaven of God,
If there be dogs and deer?
Earnest Reformers could not regard this sort of literature as a powerful auxiliary in the recasting of a nation’s faith; so Carsuel thought the Gaelic population would benefit spiritually by the substitution of his own Gaelic liturgy for the popular songs and tales.
Ossian’s “Prayer” appears to have been treated with disparagement by the Highlanders of last century as well, especially by the “clerics,” who were such a source of annoyance to poor Ossian himself while he lived. One feels inclined to ask, after reading some of the old ballads, whether the Patrick who described all the ancient Finians as in hell, was a species of the modern Protestant, so well represented by the late valiant Dr Begg and the late Dr Cumming. Whether or not it is evident that he was a persistent Protestant against the heathenism of the Féinne, indeed quite a thorn in the side of the poor old bard. The Irish monks of later days, however, appear to have taken very kindly to the laureate of the Fingalians, and to have lopped off many of the excrescences of the faithful Patrick. Scottish ecclesiastics appropriated the new Irish versions, but pruned off the excrescences with which the Basque, or Spano-Iberian imagination of the south-west of Ireland, had clothed the simple originals. Carsuel, in the sixteenth century, under the pressure of Reformation doctrines, was the first to touch unkindly the hoary locks of the ancient bard. The Féinne and their singer, however, survived in the affections and traditions of the population, until the Gospel according to the English Puritans and our own Scottish Covenanters began to out-root entirely the semi-heathen and Finian ideals of the people. So now in many districts of the Highlands, and throughout the Islands, much to the disgust of students of folk-lore, like Campbell of Islay, the only singing you hear is, not the rehearsal of the old heroic lays or the Ossianic duans, but the Psalms of David or the hymns of Sankey. As already remarked, the “clerics” of last century treated the Ossianic compositions with as little respect as Patrick, Carsuel, or Spurgeon would. At the end of a copy of Ossian’s Prayer there is a stanza by Duncan Rioch Macnicol, who was then styled the “Modern Ossian,” very much in the fashion of our present day Gaelic bards, who dub themselves as of this or that ilk. Duncan, whose feelings towards the old bards must have been rioch enough, describes poor Ossian in the following terms, given already in the original (p. 87), in sending the copy to the Rev. Donald Macnicol, Lismore:—
To Master Donald take this story;
There he dwells beside the billow;
The prayer said by Ossian hoary,
Who was aye a worthless fellow.
The last line is a condensation—though Duncan Rioch was probably in a fit of humour, supposed to be a rare state of soul for a Highland Celt—of the Protestant or Evangelic disposition of Patrick, Carsuel, and Peter Grant. These remarks have been suggested by the specimen of Gaelic which follows. Specimens have already been given of the style of writing ancient Gaelic from the earliest period down to the beginning of the sixteenth century. To those who may have paid a little attention to them it may have been interesting to discern the gradual change which Gaelic has undergone, until we find it about 1600 beginning to take the Scottish form out of which our present standard of the Gaelic Bible has been developed:—
Gaelic Prose, 1567.