Page:Poems of Ossian.djvu/56

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INTRODUCTION.

also points out many memorials of Ossian's hero Gaul or Guill in the names of localities at the head of Glen Lonain in the same neighbourhood. There are the wooded heights of Bar Ghuil and Barran-a-chuil, with Tom-na-Guille between them. The same writer suggests that Gaul's dwelling of Strumon may still be traced in Strumonadh there; and he puts the warrior's first battle at Ichrachan, close by, a spot from which many cairns of the dead have but lately been removed. From the Galic Antiquities of Dr. Smith of Campbelltown he quotes also a well-known parallel poem, the "Death of Gaul," not included by Macpherson, from which several other localities of the district may be identified.

Finally there remains to be quoted the book which carries furthest this process of identifying the topography of Ossian's poems. In Ossian and the Clyde (Glasgow, 1875), Dr. P. Hately Waddell applies to the subject the discoveries of the last hundred years, in geology, geography, and antiquities. These throw a flood of light upon many allusions, previously obscure, in the poems themselves; and by this means he has arrived at the scene of action of nearly all these compositions. It must be confessed that this style of proof, demonstration by the senses, brings a kind of conviction with it that is absent from the mere