Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

2i8 JAMES MACPHERSON.
author was induced to proceed by the sole
motive of private amusement," Some of the
materials for the volume were obtained from
MS. notes left by his friend the minister of
Sleat, who in 1768 had published his Critical
Dissertations on the origin and antiquities of the
Caledonians.
The work was bitterly attacked as a piece
of Celtic impertinence. Pinkerton drew some
attention to himself by a furious onslaught on
the Celts en masse, whom he described as a
horde of savages ; and he abused Macpherson
in the grossest fashion as a "frontless impostor ".^
" The empty vanity, shallow reading, vague asser-
tion, and etymological nonsense in the produc-
tions are," he declared, "truly risible." Hume,
however, though he did not agree with its con-
^ Pinkerton's antipathy to anything Celtic amounted
almost to a mania. Though Edward Llwyd had clearly
pointed out an affinity between Celtic and other European
languages, and although Sir William Jones afterwards
brought reasons to show that Celtic had probably the same
origin as Sanscrit, Pinkerton declared that "the real
Celtic " was as remote from the Greek as the Hottentot
from the language of the Lapps. Pinkerton's pretensions
were quietly put down by Scott in his introduction to The
MinstrelsTj of the Scottish Border, appended to the edition
of 1830. See Scott's Poetical Works, one vol., ed. 1866,
p. 548.