A CRITICAL DISSERTATION ON THE POEMS OF OSSIAN, THE SON OF FINGAL. By HUGH BLAIR, D. D. One of the Ministers of the High Church, and Professor of Rhetorick and Belles-Lettres, in the University of Edinburgh. A CRITICAL DISSERTATION ΟΝ THE POEMS OF OSSIAN, THE SON OF FINGAL. MONG the monuments remaining of the A ancient ftate of nations, few are more valuable than their poems or fongs. Hiftory, when it treats of remote and dark ages, is feldom very inftructive. The beginnings of fociety, in every country, are involved in fabulous confufion; and though they were not, they would furnish few events worth recording. But, in every period of fociety, human manners are a curious fpectacle; and the moft natural pictures of ancient manners are exhibited in the ancient poems of nations. These present to us, what is much more valuable than the hiftory of fuch transactions as a rude age can afford, The hiftory of of human imagination and paffion. They make us acquainted with the notions and feelings of our fellow-creatures in the moft artless ages; discovering what objects they admired, and what pleafures they purfued, before those refinements of fociety had taken place, which enlarge indeed, and diverfify the transactions, but disguise the manners of mankind. BESIDES this merit, which ancient poems have with philofophical obfervers of human nature, they have another with perfons of taste. They promife fome of the highest beauties of poetical writing. Irregular and unpolished we may expect the productions of uncultivated ages to be; but abounding, at the fame time, with that enthusiasm, that vehemence and fire, which are the foul of poetry. For many circumstances of those times which we call barbarous, are favourable to the poetical fpirit. That state, in which human nature fhoots wild and free, though unfit for other improvements, certainly encourages the high exertions of fancy and paffion. In the infancy of focieties, men live fcattered and difperfed, in the midst of folitary rural fcenes, where the beauties of nature are their chief entertainment. They meet with many objects, to them new and ftrange; their wonder and and furprize are frequently excited; and by the fudden changes of fortune occurring in their unfettled ftate of life, their paffions are raised to the utmost, their paffions have nothing to reftrain them: their imagination has nothing to check it. They difplay themselves to one another without difguife: and converse and act in the uncovered fimplicity of nature. As their feelings are strong, fo their language, of itself, affumes a poetical turn. Prone to exaggerate, they describe every thing in the ftrongeft colours; which of course renders their speech picturefque and figurative. Figurative language owes its rife chiefly to two caufes; to the want of proper names for objects, and to the influence of imagination and paffion over the form of expreffion. Both thefe caufes concur in the infancy of fociety. Figures are commonly confidered as artificial modes of fpeech, devised by orators and poets, after the world had advanced to a refined state. The contrary of this is the truth. Men never have used fo many figures of ftyle, as in those rude ages, when, befides the power of a warm imagination to suggest lively images, the want of proper and precife terms for the ideas they would exprefs, obliged them to have recourfe to circumlocution, metaphor, comparison, and all thofe fubftituted forms of expreffion, which give a poetical air to lan guage. |