The Dean of Lismore's Book: A Selection of Ancient Gaelic Poetry

by Unknown

The Sean Dana showed that he had largely made use of Kennedy’s collection.

Kennedy, with the strange desire that all of these collectors of Ossianic poems showed to be supposed capable of composing them, and thus to acquire literary credit at the expense of their honesty, laid claim to the authorship of part of them, and furnished the Highland Society with a statement of those parts of the poems he had really taken down from recitation, and those he claimed to have composed.

It is strange that the passages he claimed as his own composition are just those which have been most clearly established to be genuine.

Thus, lines which Kennedy marked as his own composition, are found verbatim in the Dean’s MS.

I believe that there was little or no truth in Kennedy’s assertion, which was dictated by vanity, and that his collection is, on the whole, genuine.

[ [29] A comparison of the poems in the Fragments, with those in the first quarto, containing the epic of Fingal, shows indications of the mode in which Macpherson dealt with his materials.

There are sixteen poems in the Fragments, all short; and some bearing the usual mark of a complete poem, by the first line being repeated at the end.

Thus, the second fragment begins with the sentence, “I sit by the mossy fountain; on the top of the hill of winds.” And the same expression is introduced at the end—“By the mossy fountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds;” marking a complete poem.

The first and fourth fragments we find in the quarto volume, containing Fingal, forming part of a longer poem termed Carrickthura, and here they are joined together by intermediate passages of some length, evidently interpolated by Macpherson.

The sixth and twelfth fragments contain dialogues between the poet and the son of Alpine. This was no doubt, in the original, the usual dialogue between Ossian and Patrick, always called in Scotch Gaelic poems Macalpine. The sixth fragment appears also in the quarto, in the so-called Epic of Fingal; but the dialogue is omitted, and the translation greatly altered.