Scottish Highlands. A
fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these
remains. Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when,
many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that
this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern
Gaelic. Of {196} the MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap
remained: the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in
Macpherson's handwriting or in that of his secretaries.

But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they
made a deep impression upon the time. Napoleon admired them greatly,
and Goethe inserted passages from the "Songs of Selma" in his _Sorrows
of Werther_. Macpherson composed--or translated--them in an abrupt,
rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the
prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with
images of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the
mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon,
the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on
the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the
cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal.

"A tale of the times of old!"

"Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why,
thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant
roar of streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! Come, thou
huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look
forward to Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where
Fingal descends from Ocean, from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes
of Morven in a land unknown."

Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand {197} in 1770, at the age
of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the
history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient
Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy's sensitive
imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to
read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches,
castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years
old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he
ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in
the 15th century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the
contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcl