ably any compositions in a style and on subjects so different from those of modern poetry. Ultimately, however, and mainly owing to the zeal of Doctor Blair, he undertook the task, and a few of the poems were published under Blair's auspices in the year 1760, with the title of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, translated from the Erse. The fragments were sixteen in number, and purported to be episodes of a narrative poem by Ossian, the son of Fingal, relating to the wars of that hero. The publication, owing to the great authority of Doctor Blair's name as a critic, was triumphantly received in Edinburgh, but did not excite much notice in England. Though the Edinburgh wits, philosophers, and critics, like the Lowland people generally, were not particularly well disposed towards the Highlanders, the patriotic and national spirit was sufficiently strong to induce them to look favourably upon the claim of their country to have produced a Homer. The enthusiasm ran so high in Edinburgh that Macpherson was entreated to take a journey through the Western Highlands and the Hebrides to collect materials for a completer work. He pleaded want of time and want of means. Ultimately, a liberal subscription to defray his expenses was entered into among the leading literati, lawyers, and resident nobility and gentry of Edinburgh, and he set forth upon his tour, furnished with letters of introduction to all the principal Highland proprietors and clergy. He was accompanied by a namesake, but no relative-a Mr. Macpherson, of Strathmashie -who had the reputation of being an excellent Gaelic scholar, which Macpherson himself was not, and whose assistance was considered likely to be useful.

The result of this tour, as stated by the two Macphersons, was a large collection of Gaelic poetry, much of it taken down from recitation, and much recovered in manuscript from the possession of Highland families. When Macpherson returned to Edinburgh he put himself into communication with Doctor Blair and his other friends and contributories. In a letter dated the 16th of January, 1761, he wrote to the Reverend Mr. Maclagan, of Amulree, whom he knew as the possessor of a copious manuscript collection of Gaelic poems, to announce that during his tour "he had been lucky enough to lay his hands on a pretty complete poem, and truly epic, concerning Fingal. The antiquity of

it," he said, "was easily ascertainable, and it was in his opinion not only superior to anything else in the Gaelic language, but not inferior to the more polite performances of other nations in that way." He also announced that he had thoughts of publishing the original Gaelic along with his translation, "if it would not clog the work too much, and if he could procure subscribers." Still encouraged by Doctor Blair, Macpherson completed his translation of Fingal, and proceeded with it to London to solicit the patronage of Lord Bute, the then prime minister. His lordship was not popular among the English, but he was a thorough Scot by blood, education, and spirit, and a great favourite with his own countrymen. The zeal of Macpherson gratified the powerful Scottish nobleman, and he liberally subscribed towards the expenses of the publication. The book appeared early in 1762, in English only, under the title of Fingal, an Epic Poem, in Six Books, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic Language. Macpherson declined the publication of the Gaelic on the plea of expense, and on the ground that a sufficient number of subscribers had not entered their names to warrant him in the under

taking. In the following year he published, entirely at the expense of Lord Bute, Temora, with five other poems, also purporting to be from the Gaelic of Ossian.

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To use the common phrase of the present day, the two works created a great sensation," and literary society at once ranged itself into two hostile factions, prepared to do desperate battle. It was mainly in England that any doubts of their authenticity were expressed. The Scotch, and more especially the Highlanders, were unpopular. The remembrance of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 had not been greatly dimmed by time, and the people of the south too commonly looked upon those of the extreme north as little better than savages-ignorant alike of breeches, manners, and the alphabet. The country was very partially explored by strangers. The great genius of Sir Walter Scott had not arisen-a star of the first magnitude on the literary horizon-to show its beneficent light on those remote regions. The Highlands were not the resort of tourists as they are now, from all parts of the world, and the shooters of grouse and the deer-stalkers did not venture into the country in perceptible numbers. Even the Scotch of Edinburgh and Glasgow looked

upon their northern fellow-countrymen as little better than barbarians. They were reivers, cattle dealers, highwaymen, and leviers of black-mail, for whom a short shrift and a high gallows were the appropriate doom. The Gaelic, or Erse language, as it was sometimes erroneously called, was declared by Doctor Johnson, who knew nothing about it, to be "gibberish," and in the total ignorance of the philologists of that day of the now well-ascertained fact that Gaelic is not only one of the most ancient, but one of the most beautiful and sonorous languages spoken on the globe, and of close relationship to the Sanscrit and the Hebrew, his dictatorial assertion obtained general credence. The wonder was consequently extreme that such a people should possess such a body of poetry, and from wonder the transition to doubt, to incredulity, and to antagonism, was easy and rapid.

Doctor Blair, and the believers in the authenticity of these poems, supported by a very large number of persons, who looked upon Ossian as a myth of Macpherson's invention, agreed in literary admiration of their merits. Opinion was all but unanimous that, whoever might be their author, and whatever might be their date, the poems were true poems, full of fire, pathos, and dramatic interest; different from all other poems known to the fastidious critics of the eighteenth century; different from the Greek and Roman classics; different from the earliest remnants of Anglo-Saxon romance and English ballad literature; different in style, spirit, imagery, and treatment, from anything previously known. The arguments in support of their authenticity were various. The internal evidence of their antiquity was exceedingly strong. The author or authors seemed to know nothing of cities, or of great congregations of men, except in hosts prepared for battle by land or sea. There was not the faintest trace of Grecian or Roman mythology, such as continually betrayed itself in the previous literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that in a lesser degree interfuses itself into the thought and diction of the nineteenth. There was no allusion to Judaism or Christianity, or to any form of religion, but such as was taught by the Bards and Druids of the time in which the poems purported to have been composed.

There was not the faintest symptom developing itself by accident that the poet acquainted with southern scenery, or with the scenery of any part of the

was

world, except that of the wild west Highlands of Scotland, the Hebrides, and the opposite shore of Ireland. All the imagery was appropriate to those regions, and to no other; the mist upon the mountain, the blast upon the loch, or the sea, the storm amid the corries and glens of the everlasting hills, or sweeping over the wide expanse of moorland, purple with heather, or yellow with gorse. The ideas of the Supreme Being, and of the immortality of the soul, were exactly such as prevailed among the Celtic races before the introduction of Christianity, heightened and refined by the culture of the pantheistic bards, and permeated with sad, but exalted thought. The incidents were entirely consistent with the known history and traditions of the earliest ages of Britain, and their episodial treatment and allusions, often slight and unimportant in themselves, were in perfect accordance with each other, and with the main facts elsewhere related. There was not a single anachronism in thought, in style, or in statement. The fourteen centuries which had elapsed since their alleged date of production had not left a mark upon them, except such as might fairly have been attributable to the interpolation of successive reciters, or be as fairly traced to the mind of the modern translator. The poems seemed to be dug out of a remote age-veritable fossils. Over them there lay an indescribable charm of vague sublimity. They were like Glen Coe, whose name the poet assumed, as the voice of Cona, the weirdest glen in Scotland; dark, gloomy, terrific, yet with the murmur of rills and mountain streams running down into the narrow strip of plain and pathway, suggestive of gentleness, and the soft murmur and stir of human life. Independently of their origin, it was impossible for any true and conscientious critic to withhold his admiration. Even the surly Johnson, the enemy of everything that was Scotch, acknowledged that it would be "pleasing to believe that Fingal lived and that Ossian sang."

The continental critics, as soon as the poems were translated into French, Italian, German, and other European languages, were unanimous in the expression of their delight, and two great men, Napoleon Bonaparte in France, and Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of American Independence, publicly declared that they preferred Ossian to all other poetry. Napoleon always carried a copy with him in his campaigns, and Jefferson undertook

landers generally, was more satisfactory. Macpherson's alleged inability to exhibit the original Gaelic was disposed of by the fact that he had left the manuscripts for several months at the shop of Mr. Becket, the publisher in Edinburgh, to be shown to all inquirers, and especially to such as were desirous to subscribe for their publication; that few persons looked at them, and fewer still subscribed; that as to there being no one in the Highlands who could recite six lines of Gaelic poetry, there were many then living who could repeat six hundred or a thousand lines, and that one gentleman, the Reverend Doctor Macqueen, had procured from Alexander Macpherson, in Skye, a person known for his great memory as a reciter of Ossian, a quarto manuscript, an inch and a quarter in thickness, known as the Leabhar Dearg, or Red Book, which contained a portion of the story of Fingal, which book was handed to James Macpherson, and was translated by him. In short, a whole cloud of witnesses appeared to rebut the charges, including persons who could recite long detached passages of the poems in the original language, and Gaelic scholars who brought forward manuscript copies, which had long been in their families, of parts of the poems. Ultimately the Highland Society of London sanctioned and aided the publication of the Gaelic text, with a Latin translation by the Reverend Robert Macfarlane, in three quarto volumes. To this publication the celebrated Sir John Sinclair contributed an exhaustive introduction, in which he related the whole history of the sources whence the Gaelic poems were derived. This work did not appear until the year 1807, and if Doctor Johnson, the great opponent of the Celtic claim to the possession of a Homer, had survived so long, there was evidence to convince even him of the error into which his prejudice had led him, if not gracefully to acknowledge it.

teristics upon the ancient compositions, which they recited for the delight of their auditors in the days when there were no books. But exactly the same may be said of the Iliad and the Odyssey. If it be impossible to prove the existence of Ossian, it is equally impossible to prove that Homer was not a myth. And whether Ossian or Homer ever lived and sung, it is alike certain that the Gael and the Greeks produced the poems which have been attributed, truly or falsely, to those real or imaginary authors. A question of literary identity, that goes back for centuries anterior to the invention of printing, can never be authoritatively settled, so as to leave no room for denial or incredulity. And as regards Ossian, whoever he may or may not have been, one thing is all but certain-his poems were not, as Johnson and the English critics of the eighteenth century took a malicious delight in asserting, the works of James Macpherson. They were known, in scattered and multifarious fragments, long before he was born, and, though he understood Gaelic sufficiently to be able to translate it into English, he was not only incapable of writing good Gaelic, but of writing in English such poetry as is contained in the epic story of Fingal, and in the minor and perhaps more beautiful stories of Carthon and Temora. Though his translation, on the whole, is spirited and vivid, it is not always correct, and in numberless instances does injustice to the original. Macpherson at his death bequeathed a thousand pounds for the publication of the Gaelic, and, thanks to the learning, zeal, and energy of successive editors, among whom the last, the Reverend Mr. Clerk, is not the least eminent, the text has been finally settled, to the satisfaction of Gaelic scholars, and remains an imperishable monument of the genius of the Celtic people.