"An arrow found his manly breast. He sleeps with his loved Galbina at
the noise of the sounding surge. Their green tombs are seen by the
mariner, when he bounds on the waves of the north."--_MacPherson_.

"A ruthless arrow found his breast.
His sleep 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