Note 28 — INTRODUCTION.

In 1778 and 1780 a collection of Ossianic poems, in the original Gaelic, was made by Duncan Kennedy, schoolmaster. His MS. collection was purchased by the Highland Society, and is now in the collection of MSS. in the Advocates’ Library. There is appended to it a list of the persons from whose recitations the poems were taken down.

In 1780, Dr. Smith, of Campbellton, published a quarto volume, entitled Gaelic Antiquities, containing versions in English of poems attributed to Ossian, Ullin, etc.; and in 1787 the originals were published under the title of Sean Dana.

Unhappily, Dr. Smith, instead of publishing the poems as he got them, with a literal English version, was ambitious of shining, like Macpherson, as an editor of Ossian, and of sharing in his notoriety; but the poems of the latter had already lost their lustre, and Smith did not possess the wonderful tact and originality Macpherson really showed in producing his English version, and which alone made them bearable; his version was diffuse, heavy, and turgid, and his book fell dead from the press.

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.