Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

WILKES— CHURCHILL. 187
Now be the muse disrobed of all her pride,
Be all the glare of verse by truth supplied,
And if plain nature pours a simple strain.
Which Bute may praise and Ossian not disdain,
Ossian, sublimest, simplest bard of all
Whom English infidels Macpherson call,
Then round my head shall Honoiu-'s ensigns
wave,
And pensions mark me for a willing slave."
And in The Ghost, after an ignoble attack on
Johnson, he has his laugh at the critics : —
" By truth inspired, our critics go
To track Fingal in Highland snow.
To form their own and others' creed
From manuscripts they cannot read ",
While the poems met with a mixed reception
in London, Macpherson's friends in Edinburgh
were still busy singing their praises. Blair, who
was professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,
had made them the subject of some elaborate
lectures. He took them in all good faith as
the genuine work of a bard in the third century,
discoursed on the character of their antiquity
and their poetical spirit, and, to use his own
words, "after applying the rules of criticism to
Fingal as an epic poem," he proceeded " to
examine the merit of Ossian's compositions in