disregard of social conventions.
In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old
German epic, the _Nibelungen Lied_. Works of a similar tendency in
England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published
between 1747 and 1757; especially Collins's _Ode on the Superstitions of
the Highlands_, and Gray's _Bard_, a Pindaric in which the last survivor
of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his
guild. Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the
ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_, 1765, aroused the taste for old ballads. Richard Kurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_, Thomas Warton's _History of English
Poetry_. 1774-1778, Tyrwhitt's critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace
Walpole's Gothic romance, the _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, stimulated this
awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and
contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects.
James Beattie's _Minstrel_, 1771, described the educating influence of
Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the most
remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic
past were the _Poems of Ossian_ and Thomas Chatterton's literary
forgeries.

In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what
professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard,
whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made
his version--including two complete epics, _Fingal_ and _Temora_--from
Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the 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 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 at 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 I