Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

194 JAMES MACPHERSON.
to be drawai under the ban which proscribes the
doctrines of Rousseau, it is hardly possible for
the Homeric poems, or the Nibelunge7ilied, to
escape a similar fate. The idyllic peace which
Rousseau imagined to be a feature of primitive
life in a wholly ideal " state of Nature " would
be rudely disturbed by the joy of battle and the
glory of conquest which animate Fingal's heroes,
and the gaiety of his untutored savage scarcely
accords with the passionate melancholy of
Ossian's song.
The explanation of Johnson's contempt may
be found in causes much less subtle and remote.
In simple language the poems were not of the
literature for which he was ever likely to have
any approbation. With all his great gifts and
his admirable sagacity, his tastes were noto-
riously narrow ; and the contempt which he
felt for Macpherson would probably have been
bestowed in equal measure on a Shelley or a
Keats. He despised the poems because he had
no interest in their antiquity, and no feeling for
the peculiar quality of their beauty ; and as
their beauty was exciting the admiration of
some of his friends, he burst out into a torrent
of abuse. The range of his literary symjjathies