To Master Donald take the story;
There he dwells beside the billow;
The prayer said by Ossian hoary,
Who was aye a worthless fellow.
It has been well remarked that each of the literatures of the two branches of our Celtic population was chiefly the utterance of feeling stirred by a great struggle for independence, and that each has at the heart of it “a battle disastrous to the men whose wrestle with an overmastering power is the chief theme of their bards.” The Gaelic struggle and literature began earlier, and its great battle is that of Gabhra, said to have been fought in 284 A.D. In the later Celtic literature of the Cymri the memorable battle described is that of Cattraeth, said to have been fought in 570 A.D.
While Cath Gabhra is the chief theme of the Gaelic bards, individual combats, adventures, and other battles are also rehearsed in the early ballads.
Macpherson’s “Ossian” and Smith’s “Old Lays,” whose authenticity has been so fiercely disputed, are excluded from consideration at present. They will be afterwards examined under the dates of their production. The number of lines in these works and other two poems respectively is:—
| Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian | 10,232 | lines. |
| Smith’s Old Lays | 5,335 | ” |
| Clark’s Mordubh | 758 | ” |
| MacCallum’s Collath | 504 | ” |
| Total | 16,829 | ” |
Laying aside these 16,829 lines of suspected poetry, there is still the 54,000 lines of ancient poems of unquestioned genuineness in Campbell’s “Leabhar na Féinne,” enough surely to sustain the literary character and genius of our early ancestors.