Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

62 JAMES MACPHERSON.
lay wholly in the line of the general culture
of his day.^
There is another circumstance to be borne in
mind in this connection, although it is often
neglected by Macpherson's critics, in spite of its
effect on the larger question of his life. He had
a very imperfect acquaintance with Gaelic,^ al-
though the sound of it must have been familiar
to him from his childhood. At no period of his
career could he have been called a good Gaelic
scholar ; and at this time his education, his
employment, his literary pursuits and ambition
combined to make him neglect a language
that had come to be chiefly spoken by the more
illiterate of the peasantry.
'For a purpose of his own, Laing (oj). cit.) declared that
there was a great resemblance between the Ossianic poems
and Macpherson's early works ; but when he came to prove
his case, he was able to point to only sixteen out of a total
of more than four thousand lines, undoubtedly written by
Macpherson, where any similarity could be traced; and then
it was mostly a similarity of diction, and that, too, of a very
commonplace kind. Even if any real similarity in these
cases had been fairly made out, the extent of it is not great
enough to prove Laing's contention that Macpherson wrote
the Ossianic poems himself; and conversely, it is not great
enough to prove any large influence of Gaelic poetry on his
early compositions.
" On this point see infra, pp. 125, 139, 153.