Page:Poems of Ossian.djvu/12

x During the troubles of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, of the Civil Wars and Revolution in the seventeenth, and of the Parliamentary Union and Jacobite Rebellions in the early part of the eighteenth, the mind of Scotland was entirely engrossed with politics, and the Highlands themselves were continually unsettled. No thought, therefore, could be given to the possibility of literary remains existing among the clans. It was only in the latter half of last century that secure government began to allow leisure for the growth of that culture which a few years later was to earn for Edinburgh the title of "The Modern Athens;" and then it occurred to some of the men of letters in the Scottish capital to examine the value of the traditional lore which was known to survive in the Highlands and western isles.

At length, however, the Rev. John Home, author of the tragedy of "Douglas," found a means of furthering his enquiries on the subject of Celtic poetry. At the little watering-place of Moffat, among the Dumfriesshire hills, in the summer of 1759, he met a young Highland schoolmaster named James Macpherson, who was travelling as tutor to Mr. Graham the younger, of Balgowan, and who had in his possession several transcripts of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the north. Mr. Home obtained