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Macpherson's Ossian has had many admirers; and it cannot be denied, that the compositions attributed to the son of Fingal abound with striking imagery, heroic sentiment, and hardy expression, the effect of which, on young minds especially, may be highly exhilarating for a while. But, independent of the obscurity, sameness, and repetition, which were probably characteristic of the originals— whatever those originals may have been—the translation is “done into English” in such a “Babylonish dialect,” that it might be presumed, no ear accustomed to the melody of pure prose, or the freedom of eloquent verse, could endure the incongruities of a style in which broken verse of various measures, and halting prose of almost unmanageable cadences, compound sentences as difficult to read and as dissonant to hear as a strain of music would be in execution and effect if every bar were set to a different time and in a different key. If for such wild works of imagination a corresponding diction be desirable, a style between prose and verse, not a heterogeneous jumbling of both, might perhaps be invented. For this we must have a poetical foundation with a prose superstructure: the former, that the vehicle of thought may admit of florid embellishment; the latter, that full licence may be obtained of accommodating, by expansion or contraction, the scope of the ideas, unincumbered with rhyme, and unrestricted by infrangible metrical trammels.

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The episode of Morna is, perhaps, the most truly beautiful and pathetic, as well as simple and intelligible, narrative among these rhapsodical productions. In the following experiment, which is submitted to the curious, the anapæstic foot is adopted as the groundwork, because cadences of that measure have peculiar fluency. There is some difficulty, indeed, to the reader, in hitting the right accents at all times, from the great laxity of our language in that respect, and the carelessness of writers; yet as this movement admits of the utmost variety of subdivisions, and the lines may be lengthened or shortened, according to the burden of the matter of each, it is well suited to a mode of composition which would blend the harmony of song with the freedom of discourse, if such union were compatible. This, to some extent, has been proved practicable in many passages of several English translations of the Psalms and the Prophecies; of which a very perfect specimen may be found in the first seven verses of the ninety-fifth Psalm, according to the Common Prayer-book rendering. When read with simplicity, and the due accent laid upon the long syllables, nothing perhaps in human speech can be quoted more delicately implicated than the clauses, or more melodious than the sequence of plain Saxon sounds that compose the diction, while the variety of cadence and the change of cesura in every turn of the thought is not less admirable. The strain passes into entirely another key from the eighth verse inclusive to the end, the theme in fact suggesting a correspondent change to the minstrel's hand, when he drops the hortatory preamble, and proceeds to the historical argument, or, rather, when he gives way abruptly at the sound of the very voice to which he is calling upon his hearers to hearken; while Jehovah himself from between the cherubim (for the scene is in the temple) speaks out, “Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation . . . . when your fathers tempted Me, proved Me, and saw my works,” &c. to the fearful close of the psalm.

The following attempt to tame what has been called “prose run mad,” into what may easily be designated by a phrase not less opprobrious, is made upon a principle more strictly rhythmical than the measured style of our vernacular translations of Scripture poetry; and in behalf of it a claim to be received with indulgence by the admirers of Gaelic legends may be fairly preferred, since the offence, if it be one, against good taste is not likely to be imitated, nor will the original culprit soon be induced to repeat it, being himself of opinion, that though a few pages got up in this manner may not be unpleasing, a volume would be intolerable.

It may be necessary to add, that this experiment on the tale of Morna has not been made from Macpherson, but from a version of Fingal of which a few copies only were printed at Edinburgh, some years ago, for private circulation. Whether the work has ever been further published, the present writer knows not; but it appeared to him, on the hasty perusal of a lent copy, preferable to the old one.