Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

lo yAMES MACPHERSON.
eight of Temora as translations of epic poems
composed by Ossian in the third century, and
handed down from mouth to mouth for fifty
generations, suspicion ripened into an open at-
tack on the translator's honesty. The attack
on Macpherson chiefly proceeded from London,
where suspicion was aided and inflamed by the
hatred and contempt which happened to prevail
at the time for everything connected with the
Scottish race ; and the question of the authen-
ticity of the poems assumed an international
colour. While their merits gained them a great
share of popular admiration, critical oj^inion ran
to extremes : they were either welcomed with
acclamation as a long-lost work of stupendous
genius, or else roundly denounced as bombastic
trash and a barefaced forgery. Blair, the liter-
ary dictator of the Scottish capital, put Ossian
on a higher level than Homer ; and Johnson,
who ruled in the south, branded Macpherson
as a gross impostor. Others, like Gray, Hume,
and Gibbon, with less ardour and more dis-
crimination, selected various features of the
poems for special criticism, of a nature some-
times favourable and sometimes adverse to their
authenticity ; but while the learned exhausted