ted.

The long debate on the so-called poems of Ossian is now ended. They are
known to be a not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. Yet their
importance in literary history remains undiminished, and the life of
Macpherson has a curious kind of pathos. He was the creature and victim
of the Romantic movement, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, into
supplying fraudulent evidence for the favorite Romantic theory that a
truer and deeper vein of poetry is to be found among primitive peoples.
Collins's _Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland_
and Gray's _Bard_ show the literary world prepared to put itself to
school to Celtic tradition. Macpherson supplied it with a body of poetry
which exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial date in his
history is his meeting in 1759 with John Home, the author of the once
famous tragedy of _Douglas_. In the summer of that year Home was
drinking the waters at Moffat, and among the visitors assembled there
found Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, then a boy of ten, and his
tutor, James Macpherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambitious, who had
been educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home,
full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized upon the opportunity to
question Macpherson concerning the poems that were rumored to have
survived among the Gaelic-speaking population of Scotland. In the light
of what we now know it is not difficult to understand the genesis of this
great European fraud. Macpherson was proud of his race, which he had
celebrated in an heroic poem called _The Highlander_. He had interested
himself in Gaelic poetry, though his knowledge of the tongue was not
good, and he had by him some fragments of genuine Gaelic poems. He was
flattered by Home's appeal to him, and, feeling perhaps that the few and
slight genuine poems which he could produce would hardly warrant the
magnificence of his allusions to Gaelic literature, he forged a tale in
poetic prose, called _The Death of Oscar_, and presented it to Home as a
translation from the Gaelic. The poem was much admired, and Macpherson,
unable now to retrace his steps without declaring himself a cheat, soon
produced others from the same source. These were submitted to the
literary society of Edinburgh, with the great Dr. Blair at its head, and
were pronounced to be the wonder of the world. From this point onward,
during a long and melancholy life