Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

ig2 yAMES MACPHERSON.
him by Smollett, "the great Cham of Literatm^e ".
It was some years since he had given his last
Rambler to the public, and completed the laboiu"s
of his Dictionary; and he was now securely estab-
lished in the seat that had once been filled by
Dryden and by Pope. Although he had formerly
written of pensioners in terms of great disparage-
ment, he was now in receipt of a pension himself;
not, it was agreed, for anything that he was
expected to do, but for what he had already
done. With a circle of devoted friends about
him, and a faithful chronicler beginning to record
his sayings, he assumed, and exercised with
vigour, all the functions of a literary dictator ;
and whether his opinions were good or bad,
they carried weight.
From the beginning he had, as Boswell tells
us, not only denied the authenticity of the poems,
but, what was still more annoying to their ad-
mirers, he refused to admit that they had any
merit at all. He freely expressed the opinion
that the work was unmitigated rubbish. When
Blair asked him whether he thought that any
man of a modern age could have written such
poems, he replied : " Yes, sir ; many men, many
women, and many children ; " and to Reynolds