29th Psalm make Lebanon and Sirion skip "like a young wild-ox;" while Isaiah in his 55th chapter writes of the hills breaking forth into singing, and the trees of the field clapping their hands? Homer, too, relates that the pines of Calypso's isle reached to heaven, and that in the storm which assailed the solitary Ulysses the winds of north, east, south, and west clashed all at once together.
Still another kind of attack assailed the English version of Ossian before it had been long before the world. The controversy on the subject had been little more than opened when it was complicated by a claim from the sister isle. As early as 1761 it was asserted that Fingal and his heroes, though discovered in the Scottish Highlands, were not really Scottish, but Irish. Shaw, in his Enquiry already referred to, asserted that Selma was not at all known in Scotland; that no one in the Highlands was acquainted with the name of Fingal; and that, while the name of the hero does not appear in the Chronicon Scotorium, from which the list of Scottish kings is taken, a full account of the actions of Fingal, or Fion MacComhal, may be found in the Irish histories of Dr. Keating and others. A small volume making the same claim on the subject was also published at Dusseldorf in 1787, by one Edmond, Baron de Harold, an Irishman in the service of the Elector Palatine. In it were
