leep is by thy side, Galbina,
Where wrestles the wind with ocean.
The sailor sees their graves as one,
When rising on the ridge of the waves."
--_Clerk_

But again Mr. Archibald Sinclair, a Glasgow publisher, a letter from whom
is given by Mr. Campbell in his "Tales of the West Highlands," has "no
hesitation in affirming that a considerable portion of the Gaelic which
is published as the original of his [MacPherson's] translation, is
actually translated back from the English." And Professor Sullivan says:
"The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed
evidently with great labor afterward, in which sentences or parts of
sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior
word-paste of MacPherson's own."[23]

It is of course no longer possible to maintain what Mr. Campbell says is
the commonest English opinion, viz., that MacPherson invented the
characters and incidents of his "Ossian," and that the poems had no
previous existence in any shape. The evidence is overwhelming that there
existed, both in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales,
and poems popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn MacCumhail. But
no poem has been found which corresponds exactly to any single piece in
MacPherson; and Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious
character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the
ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names
belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and
undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of
MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's
text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of
Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's,
1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free
translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787)
under the title "Sean Dana," Smith frankly took liberties with his
originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he
made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase
rested, he enabled the public to see how far his "Ancient Lays," were
really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his
own editorial labors.[24]

Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to
"amalgamate with the literat