Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian

INTRODUCTION. xvii
Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems of
Ossian, by W. Shaw, A.M., published in London
in 1781, also condemned Macpherson's work as
spurious ; while Pinkerton, finding that the authen-
ticity of Ossian would disprove some of his
cherished theories regarding the early races of
Scotland, made occasion in the second volume of
his history to discredit the poems as forgeries. Of
later writers Lord Macaulay has inherited the anti-
Scottish prejudices of Dr. Johnson with doubled
virulence, and this to the suppression of fact in at
least one instance. In the thirteenth chapter of
his history he forgets the existence of Johnson,
and describes an enthusiasm for things Scot-
tish existing at the time of Ossian's publication.
That enthusiasm only arose forty years later
with the rising star of Walter Scott.
Time itself has answered many of these attacks.
Dr. Johnson's declaration in his Journey to the
Western Islands that " the poems of Ossian never
existed in any other form than that which we have
seen," and that "the editor or author never could
show the original, nor can it be shewn by any
other," was refuted by the publication, already
referred to, of the Gaelic originals in 1807.* Mr.
* The Rev. M. Clerk of Kilmallie in the introduction to
his new translation of Ossian (1870), quotes an advertise-