duced into the Songs of the Bards, more refined, it is probable, and exalted, according to the usual poetical license, than the real manners of the country." That is an excellent observation: poets are not mere historians or statists—they beautify what they record, and all that is so recorded shines lovelier and lovelier, before the eyes of each succeeding generation, through the mist of years. And thus the genius even of a rude people, continually gathering power, may far transcend all surrounding realities; till, effulging with an almost miraculous splendour in some one gifted spirit—as an Ossian—it gives to future times of highest civilisation, in traditionary inspirations, assurance of a great poet singing in the early dawn.
"There are," saith the Doctor, "four great stages through which men successively pass, in the progress of society. The first and earliest is the life of hunters; pasturage succeeds to this, as the ideas of property begin to take root; next agriculture; and lastly, commerce. Throughout Ossian’s Poems we plainly find ourselves in the first of these periods of society; during which hunting was the chief employment of men, and the principal method of their procuring subsistence. Pasturage was not, indeed, wholly unknown, for we hear of dividing the herd in case of a divorce; but the allusions to herds and to cattle are not many, and of agriculture we find no traces. No cities appear to have been built in the territories of Fingal. No arts are mentioned, except that of navigation and of working in iron. Everything presents to us the most simple and unimproved manners. At their feasts the heroes prepared their own repasts; they sat round the light of the burning oak; the wind lifted their locks, and whistled through the open halls. Whatever was beyond the necessaries of life was known to them only as the spoil of the Roman province—the gold of the stranger–the lights of the stranger—the steeds of the stranger—the children of the rein.” And he adds—"Every where the same face of rude nature appears; a country wholly uncultivated, thinly inhabited, and recently peopled." All this we once believed—and it may be all true—but how happened it that the natives were all hunters? and that they never thought of asking themselves if there might not be edible creatures in their rivers, lochs, and seas? Sure, they must have seen the salmon leaping up waterfalls with their tails in their mouths–
"The pellochs rolling in their mountain bays,"
and shoals of bottle-nosed whales walloping shorewards before the storm. Angling may have been too recondite an idea for such a simple people; but, with spears in their hands, how could they avoid the discovery of the lister? How could they, acquainted as they were with "navigation and working in iron," escape the use of hook and line? Even nets - made of hair from the tails of the "steeds of the stranger"—might, one would think, have fallen within the range of their inventive genius. We can with difficulty imagine a nautical nation without some sort of fisheries. There must have been herrings in those days—even Lochfines—and it is hard to believe that there might not have been rizzar'd haddocks. It is strange that a Scotch philosopher like Dr Blair should have forgot "the fisher state." Is it credible that a hungry people should for ages have neglected the whole finny race? That it should never have occurred to the most ingenious of the heroes, or of their tails, to place an iron pot under a salmon-leap?—or to take up a chance fish, who had unwittingly flung himself out of the water on the bank, and try what sort of eating might prove the monarch of the flood, even when raw? At a feast of shells a haunch of venison would have been fitly faced by a cut of salmon.
"Pasturage," the Doctor says, "was not indeed wholly unknown, for we hear of dividing the herd in the case of a divorce." That passage in Ossian we do not at this moment remember—and we are sorry to think that there was such a law. Was it customary to insert a clause to that effect in marriage-settlements? If so, then pasturage, so far from being "not wholly unknown," must have been universally prevalent; and we must believe nowte to have usually constituted the bride's tocher. At no time could all the mountains have been covered with wood; the pasturage, as high up as some fifteen hundred or two thousand feet above the level of the sea, must always have been
