rational before the critic opens the book. So anxious is the Irish
mind to see that effaced which it is conscious of having neglected.

There are two compositions which affect an interest comparable to
that which Ireland claims for her bardic literature, One is the
Ossian of MacPherson, the other the Nibelungen Lied.

If we are to suppose Macpherson faithfully to have written down,
printed, and published the floating disconnected poems which he
found lingering in the Scotch highlands, how small, comparatively,
would be their value as indications of antique thought and feeling,
reduced then for the first time to writing, sixteen hundred years
after the time of Ossian and his heroes, in a country not the home
of those heroes, and destitute of the regular bardic organisation.
The Ossianic tales and poems still told and sung by the Irish
peasantry at the present day in the country of Ossian and Oscar,
would be, if collected even now, quite as valuable, if not more so.
Truer to the antique these latter are, for in them the cycles are
not blended. The Red Branch heroes are not confused with Ossian's
Fianna.

But MacPherson's Ossian is not a translation. In the publications
of the Irish Ossianic poetry we see what that poetry really was--
rude, homely, plain-spoken, leagues removed from the nebulous
sublimity of MacPherson.

With regard to the other, the Germans, who naturally desire to
refer its composition to as remote a date as possible, and who
arguing from no scientific data, but only style, ascribe the
authorship of the Nibelungen to a poet living in the latter part of