Page:Poems of Ossian.djvu/67

Rh by his heroes. Unlike the poets of Greece and Rome, Ossian uses no "divine machinery" in his work. To account for this circumstance Macpherson quotes Celtic traditions which affirm that Trenmor, the great-grandfather of Fingal, had, in civil war, suppressed the entire order of the Druids. A reference to the event occurs in "Cathlin of Clutha." The people thus, the translator suggests, had been left without a worship. His theory is helped by the statement of Tacitus, that the Romans from the days of Julius Cæsar had set themselves to the extinction of the Druids. It is supported, too, by the fact that the earliest Christian missionaries found the native religion extinct, and themselves took the name of Culdees from inhabiting the Druids' empty cells.

It should be remembered here, however, that no graven image has ever been found among the remains of prehistoric Scotland. Hence it is just possible to suppose that the objects of Druid worship did not lend themselves to bardic handling. The late research of Rawlinson and other explorers in the East has brought to notice the likeness between the menhirs and cromlechs and circles of Scotland, and the stone remains of ancient Chaldea; between the once-lit altein of Caledonia and Ezekiel's "fire-stones of Tyre."—(Ez. xxviii. 14–16). Dr. Wylie recently, in the first volume of