si

had sent Gray two manuscript bits of the as yet unprinted "Fragments," communicated to Walpole by Sir David Dalrymple, who furnished Scotch ballads to Percy. "I am so charmed," wrote Gray, "with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot help giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about

antiquity, if it be antiquity; but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I was so struck, so extasié with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language for a man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his correspondence of about this date is filled with references to Ossian which enable the modern reader to understand in part the excitement that the book created among Gray's contemporaries. The letters that he got from MacPherson were un

skeptical as to their authenticity, wrote to Gray, assuring him that these poems were in everybody's mouth in the Highlands, and had been handed down from father to son, from an age beyond all memory and tradition. Gray's final conclusion is very much the same with that of the general public, to which t

al facts upon which it turned may be given in a nut-shell. In 1759 Mr. John Home, author of the tragedy of "Douglas," who had become interested in the subject of Gaelic poetry, met in Dumfriesshire a young Scotchman, named James MacPherson, who was traveling as private tutor to Mr. Graham of Balgowan. MacPherson had in his possession a number of manuscripts which, he said, were transcripts of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the Highlands. He translated two of these for Home, who was so much struck wit

de his versions from Gaelic poems ascribed to Ossian or Oisin, the son of Fingal or Finn MacCumhail, a chief renowned in Irish and Scottish song and popular legend. Fingal was the king of Morven, a district of the western Highlands, and head of the ancient warlike clan or race of the Feinne or Fenians. Tradition placed him in the third centu

n Homer: the "dark-bosomed" ships, the "car-borne" heroes, the "white-armed" maids, the "long-bounding" dogs of the chase. The scenery is that of the western Highlands; and the solemn monotonous rhythm of MacPherson's style accorded well with the tone of his descriptions, filling the mind with images of vague sublimity and desolation: the mountain torrent, the dark rock in the ocean, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the

O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but fallen before us; for, one day, we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield."[3] "They rose rustling like a flock of sea-fowl when the waves expel them from the shore. Their sound was like a thousand streams that meet in Cona's vale, when, after a stormy night, they turn their dark eddies beneath the pale light of the morn. As the dark shades of au

sued at once a very emphatic expression of incredulity. Among the most truculent of the disbelievers was Dr. Johnson. He had little liking for Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism. In his tour of the Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, he showed an insensibility, and even a kind of hostility, to the wild beauties of Highland scener

he silence

farthest

said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson: 'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed p

an might write such stuff forever, if he would abandon his mind to it." To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland hosts, he said: "I look upon MacPherson's 'Fingal' to be as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with." Johnson's arguments were mostly a priori. He asserted that the ancient Gael w

1849. As to Gaelic manuscripts, there are over sixty in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, varying in age from three hundred to five hundred years.[7] There is, e.g., the "Glenmasan Manuscript" of the year 1238, containing the story of "Darthula,"[8] which is the groundwork of the same story in MacPherson's "Ossian." There is the important "Dean of Lismore's Book," a manuscript coll

g proof of authenticity. "Two facts," he says, "are enough to convince me of the genuineness of the ancient Gaelic poetry. The truthfulness with which it reflects the melancholy aspects of Highland scenery, the equal truthfulness with which it expresses the prevailing sentiment of the Gael, and his sad sense of his people's destiny. I need no other proofs that the Ossianic poetry is a native formation, and comes from the primeval heart of the Gaelic race."[11] And he quotes, in support of his view, a well-known passage from Matthew Arnold's "Study of Celtic Literature": "The Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, MacPherson's 'Ossian,' carried, in the last century, this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise MacPherson's 'Ossian' here. Make the part of what is forged, modern

of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his soul with all his ghastly wounds. . .' Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness. In MacPherson's work it is exactly the reverse: everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as the

nd it must be confessed that, in spite of the deep poetic feeling which pervades these writings, and the undeniable beauty of single passages, they have damnable iteration. The burden of their song is a burden in every sense. Mr. Malcolm Laing, one of MacPherson's most persistent adversaries, who published "Notes and Illustrations t

behind

e, disastrous

tions, and wit

xes mo

trong bias upon the mind, and were one to pronounce upon the genuineness of MacPherson's "Ossian," as a whole, from impressions of tone and style, it might be guessed that whatever element of true ancient poetry it contains, it had been thoroughly steeped in mode

tee of the Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.[13] It is too voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled the point as to the precise use which MacPherson made of his materials, whether, i.e., he gave literal renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether he manipulated them-and to what extent-by piecing fragments together, lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, interpolating, modernizing, as Percy did with his ballads. He was chall

purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, e.g., Dr. Johnson was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from old manuscripts. His copies, if he had them-and I believe him to have none-are nothing. Where are thee manuscripts? They can be shown if they exist, but they were never shown. De non existentibus et non appa

after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These, however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found, or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible, which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known, for the same myster

own knowledge of Gaelic was imperfect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole matter-in 1862-is as follows: "My theory then is, that about the beginning of the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth, or earlier, Highland bards may have fused floating popular traditions into more complete forms, engrafting their own ideas on what they found; and that MacPherson found their works, translated and altered them; published the translation in 1760;[19] made the Gaelic ready for the press; published some of it in 1763,[20] and made away with the evidence of what he had done, when he found that his conduct was blamed. I can see no other way out of the maze of testimony." But by 1872 Mr. Campbell had come to a conclusion much less favorable to the claims of the Gaelic text. He now considers that the English was first composed by MacPherson and that "he and other translators afterward worked

ot be more distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp wher

at the noise of the sounding surge. Their green tombs are seen by

arrow foun

s by thy si

les the win

ees their gr

n the ridge o

le

the Gaelic which is published as the original of his [MacPherson's] translation, is actually translated back from the English." And Professor Sullivan says: "The so-called originals are a very curious

tes, as one proof of the modern and spurious character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewa

and could hardly, therefore, influence the verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the ancient classical literatures, e.g., have always worked; or as Italian and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was practically inaccessible to all but a f

ed by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly here was what it had been waiting for-"a tale of the times of old"; and the solemn, dirge-

tterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alludi

l ye round me

mbling waves

n caves was

ld blast of the tr

n himself; and indeed, that Johnson was not so very far wrong when he said that anyone could do it if he would abandon his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic verbiage in a number of pieces which he pretended to have translated from the Saxon: "Ethelgar," "Kenrick," "Cerdick," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a composition which he called "Godred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and one from the ancient British, which he entitled "The Heilas." He did not catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage or two from "Kenrick" will show: "Awake, son of Eldulph! Thou that sl

erit of MacPherson's work remained, although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in th

ead! have I not

ht-rolling brea

that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German Sturm und Drang period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society,

cert. I trace this bard, with his silver locks, as he wanders in the valley and explores the footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains but their tombs. His thought then hangs on the silver moon, as her sinking beams play upon the rippling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and gone recurs to the hero's mind-deeds of times when he gloried in the approach of danger, and emulation nerved his whole frame; when the pale orb shone upon his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and illuminated his triumphant return. When I see depicted on his countenance a bosom full of woe; when I behold his heroic greatness si

t rocks, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon,'" etc. The reading is interrupted by a mutual flood of te

ugh wild heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . . Long will those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of Caledonia, long will they continue to

herson's "Ossian," or more remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic mood. The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended with

eep and dark blu

st above, round as the shield of my fathers,"-perhaps the most hack

ert were my dwe

tion of the st

the night: Mos

sent for slu

thy fierce a

he tempest and

but in another sense he was very little romantic, and there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust nature upon which such poetry as Ossian could fasten.[31] It is just at this point, indeed, that definitions diverge and the two streams of romantic tendency part company. These Carlyle has called "Wertherism" and "G?tzism"[32] i.e. sentimentalism and mediaevalism, though so mild a word as sentimentalism fails to express adequately the mor

d that there was no reasonable doubt of the antiquity and authenticity of MacPherson's "Ossian." "Fingal"-which seems to have been the favorite-was again turned into heroic couplets by Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the attestations of a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness of the originals; and by an argumentative introduction, in which the author quotes Dr. Blair's dictum that

one commissio

s, came running

med-'Cuthullin,

lin hide the

foes the l

ems determine

f the critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. Homer could not be put in any dress through which the beauty and interest of the original wou

fair shall m

strain in

a manly b

to thy l

of the Last Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33] The passage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met at the hall of a chieftain

id that all doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skele

many imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen der V?lker" (1778-79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay "Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter V?lker" written in 1773. Schiller was one of the converts; Klopstock and his circle called themselves "bards"; and an exclamatory and violent mannerism came into vogue, known in German literary history as Bardengebrüll. MacPherson's personal history need not be followed here in detail. In 1764 he went to Pensacola as secretary to Governor Johnston. He was afterwar

Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the G

cPherson and was a passage

om "Ca

candi

conscious

"Fingal

s "Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a lite

m Irish sources, in Dr. R. D. Joyc

anged by J. F. Campbell," London, 1872. Selections from "The Dean of Lismore's Book" were edited and pub

Literature" in the "En

by J. C. Shairp, 1872, pp.

scar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe; and, about 1830, ended by furnishing bapti

Report," "the Committee has not been able to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the poems published by him. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to supply chasms and to give connection, by inserting passages which he did not

he Authenticity of the

] C

ighland Society of London," 3 vols., London, 1807. The work included dissertations on the authenticity of the poems by Sir Jno. Sinclair, and the Abbé Cesarotti (

Highlands," J. F. Campbell, Ed

trathmashie, one of MacPherson's helpers

ragment

k of "Temora." S

ar Na Feinn

ante, p.

ia Britannica": "

see Archibald McNeil's "Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems,"

na never sounds so sweetly

omplaint of

a copy of "Ossian," see Phelps' "Eng

of Werther,"

ient Scotland," book ii

de Harold,

uath, in "The Twa Dogs"; to "Caric-thura" in "The Whistle"; and to "Ca

he's "G?tz von

Egerton Brydges," 4th ed.

e ante,

rneur in 1777 and 1810: by Lacaussade in 184

ighteenth Century L

have been of Irish descent. He was