n knowledge eagerly, as those of the Queen of Sheba of old when
she listened to Solomon. But all too soon did the conversation change.
My cousin was mighty in Gaelic etymology, and so was the mineralogist;
and while my cousin held that the name of the Barony of Gruids was
derived from the great hollow tree, the mineralogist was quite as
certain that it was derived from its syenite, or, as he termed it, its
_granite_, which resembled, he remarked, from the whiteness of its
feldspar, a piece of curd. _Gruids_, said the one, means the place of
the great tree; _Gruids_, said the other, means the place of the curdled
stone. I do not remember how they settled the controversy; but it
terminated, by an easy transition, in a discussion respecting the
authenticity of Ossian--a subject on which they were both perfectly
agreed. There could exist no manner of doubt regarding the fact that the
poems given to the world by Macpherson had been sung in the Highlands by
Ossian, the son of Fingal, more than fourteen hundred years before. My
cousin was a devoted member of the Highland Society; and the Highland
Society, in these days, was very much engaged in ascertaining the right
cut of the philabeg, and in determining the chronology and true sequence
of events in the Ossianic age.

Happiness perfect and entire is, it is said, not to be enjoyed in this
sublunary state; and even in the Gruids, where there was so much to be
seen, heard, and found out, and where I was separated by more than
thirty miles from my Latin--for I had brought none of it from home with
me--this same Ossianic controversy rose like a Highland fog on my
horizon, to chill and darken my hours of enjoyment. My cousin possessed
everything that had been written on the subject, including a
considerable amount of manuscript of his own composition; and as Uncle
James had inspired him with the belief that I could master anything to
which in good earnest I set my mind, he had determined that it should be
no fault of his if I did not become mighty in the controversy regarding
the authenticity of Ossian. This was awful. I liked Blair's Dissertation
well enough, nor did I greatly quarrel with that of Kames; and as for
Sir Walter's critique in the _Edinburgh_, on the opposite side, I
thought it not only thoroughly sensible, but, as it furnished me with
arguments against the others, deeply interesting to boot. But then there
succeeded a vast ocean of dissertation, emitted by Highland g