Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

ITS RECEPTION. 223
tion. In March, 1773, the Critical Review
damned it with faint praise, but rebuked Mac-
pherson for taking Hberties with the original;
and, by way of driving his criticism home, the
reviewer gave a long list of the different ways in
which Macpherson had rendered Kopv6aio\o<i, the
epithet of Hector. Some of his friends, notably
Sir John Eliot, the physician, who carried it
round to his patients, endeavoured to save it
from ridicule; but it was everywhere asserted
that Macpherson had done an audacious thing
in parading Homer in a plaid and a kilt. Wal- .
pole laughed at it. "Macpherson," he wrote,
" has been trying to prove how easy it is to
make a Fingal out of Homer, after having tried
to prove that Fingal was an original poem. But
we live in an age of contradictions." ^
The version of the Iliad was a mere by-
work ; and, whether it was good or bad, Mac-
pherson set no store by it. He had a much
more important undertaking in view. The
booksellers were looking about them for some
competent person willing to continue Hume's
History, which, in spite of the early attack upon
it, had in the end met with great success.
^ Walpole's Letters, v. 444, 2nd March, 1773.