Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

migrations northward from Ireland, that led by Carbry Riada, King Cormac's relative, founded Dalriada of Argyle. The Irish certainly carried their own name of Scots into the northern country.

It may be said of Ossian, as Girardet said of Homer--"We know nothing of his birth, life, or death." But tradition calls him the son of Fion, stolen by a magician, and ultimately becoming the chief bard of the Fianna or Fenians. When these people were crushed at the battle of Gavra, he was spirited away by a fair lady, and lived with her in a palace below the ocean for a hundred and fifty years. Allowed to return to Erin, the story goes that he met with St. Patrick, to whom he related the events of the past, but refused to be a convert to the new faith, Another tale declares that, when staying with the Saint, he objected to the larder.

The Harp, a periodical of 1859, remarks, that other bards got hold of the poems of Oisin or Ossian, "and linked them together by the addition of a suppositious dialogue between the old bard and the Saint." The Harp fancies Ossian had met with "some of the missionaries of the Faith who preceded St. Patrick into Erinn."

Miss Brook, a distinguished Irish authority, thinks some of the so-called Ossianic poems arose as late as the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries Anyhow, those coming down to our day betray a remarkably heathenish character, and preserve the manners and opinions of a semi-barbarous people, who were endowed with strong imagination, high courage, childlike tenderness, and gentle chivalry for women.

Goethe makes Werther exclaim--"Ossian has, in heart, supplanted Homer." Windisch, no mean critic, has these observations--"The Ossian epoch is later than that of Conchobat and Cuchulinn, but yet preceded the introduction

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