succulent; and once introduced, there is no setting bounds to the propagation of red and black cattle of a smallish size, running, when gralloched, from ten to twenty stone, the sweetest perhaps of any, almost as fine flavoured as deer.
With regard to agriculture, it is true that "we find no traces of it" in Ossian. Of what, then, think ye, did they brew beverage for the "Feast of Shells?" Strong drink they had—and we shrewdly suspect it was Glenlivet. There must have been, depend on't, bonnie riggs o' barley here and there amang the bloomin' heather—and not in fear of the excise-man, but simply because in nature it is best, not unfrequent, in solitary places, the sma' still faintly tinging the desert air with its salutary peat-reek.
Of fowling, there are no traces in Ossian, any more than of fishing; but as bows and arrows were in the hands of all, even of the females, an occasional whawp—shy bird though it be—must have been shot sitting on the moor; and now and then, surely, a heedless capercailzie, in breeding time, brought down from his pine-top. "The birds and animals of the country," saith the Doctor, "were probably not numerous; and his acquaintance with them was limited, as they were little subjected to the uses of man." The Doctor is here accounting for the scanty notices of natural history in Ossian's poems; but we have an eye to the table or genial board. "Some comparisons," he says, "are taken from birds and beasts; as eagles, sea-fowl, the horse, the deer, and the mountain-bee;" and honey, therefore, we may remark, they no doubt had in abundance. Glenlivet, we have seen, was not wanting and of that amalgamation is Athole-brose.
We hold, then, for reasons now shortly assigned, that the Fingallians, at whatever era they flourished, though perhaps not amply provided with, were far from being destitute of fish and fowl—without puzzling the question with poultry; and that, in addition to roe and red deer, they had cattle, probably sheep, and certainly goats. They were a people in the fishing, fowling, hunting, and herding state; and it is not easy to imagine a state more favourable for poetry.
Let it not be said that these assertions are mutely contradicted in Ossian's poems. Ossian was not a grazier—therefore his talk is not of bullocks. Deer-hunting, in all its branches, must have been well known to him; but he did not write for the Sporting Magazine—therefore he but shows us "the hunter of deer and the warrior," with his gray dogs and we imagine, in all its forms, the chase
"High mirth of the desert, fit pastime for kings!"
There is nothing heroic in fishing, nor in cooking or eating fish, nor in sheep-shearing, nor in sheephead and trotters; nor in a hundred other useful arts and occupations then rife, but of which the old blind bard deigns not to sing the praises to his harp, vocal but to those of the mighty.
The Doctor says truly, "that no cities appear to have been built in the territories of Fingal." It is no such easy matter to build a city; but there were—for there must have been—clachans. We are all of us by nature gregarious; and we defy the human mind to imagine Morvern dotted but with single huts, with here and there a hall. Bothies—shiellings—hovels—huts—there were, single or in pairs and far and high aloof; nor uninhabited the caves facing mountain or sea; but many and many a low turf-roofed village laughed by loch or riverside; and so far from being "recently peopled," as the Doctor affirms, the natives were indigenous to a degree, and had lived there since a few ages after the Judgment of the Flood. Neither do we believe with the Doctor, that "the wind whistled through the open halls." From time immemorial cozy have been the Highland huts; and though the windows of the halls were not glazed in Fingal's time, the nobles were not such ninnies as not to weather-fend them—perhaps with furze—against wind and snow. It seldom blows—even in the Highlands—at once from all the airts; and in the lea of the hurricane, the bard embowered could smite, with unruffled hair, his harp to the deeds of the heroes.
The Doctor believes that Fingal licked the Romans as they never had been licked in their born days—and without especial wonder. "He was enriched with the spoils of the Roman province"—he "was ennobled by his victories" over them—from them he
