Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

GAELIC POETRY. 53
had overtaken that emphatic language, their merit
would be at once recognised. Some of them
were of a high antiquity, and for sublime
sentiment, nervousness of expression and high-
spirited metaphor, were hardly to be equalled
among the chief productions of modern times ;
others, again, were very tender, simple and
affecting. Of the simpler sort the writer en-
closed a specimen ; the burden of it was, he
said, not unlike Homer's story of Bellerophon,
and it might gratify the curiosity of the learned
to see the different treatment of the same theme
by a Highland bard.
The writer of this letter was Jerome Stone,
a young man who held the humble post of
master of the grammar school at Dunkeld. He
has a claim to be mentioned here because he
was the first translator of Gaelic poetry, and the
immediate forerunner of Macpherson. His his-
tory is a strange one. The son of a sailor, he
was born in 1727, at Scoonie, in Fifeshire, a
district in which Gaelic was then almost un-
known. As a mere boy he was sent out as a
pedlar with a box of braces and buttons, but he
seized an early opportunity of exchanging his
stock for a parcel of books. He picked up what