, poor Macpherson was enslaved to the
fraud which had its beginning in the shyness and vanity of his own
character. He was bound now to forge or to fail; and no doubt the
consciousness that it was his own work which called forth such rapturous
applause supported him in his labors and justified him to his own
conscience. A subscription was easily raised in Edinburgh to enable him
to travel and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For a few months he
perambulated the western highlands and islands, and returned to Edinburgh
bringing with him _Fingal_, a complete epic poem in six books. This was
followed by _Temora_, in eight books, also attributed to the great Gaelic
bard Ossian; and the new Celtic fashion was established.

These poems had an immense success. Everyone knows how they influenced
the youth of Goethe, and captured the imagination of Napoleon. It is
less surprising that they enraptured the poet Gray, and were approved by
the professor Blair, for they were exactly modelled on the practice and
theory of these two critics. All the fashionable doctrine of that age
concerning the history of poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry,
so it was held, is to be found in its perfection only in primitive
society, before it is overlaid by the complexities of modern
civilization. Its most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, is the
epic; and Dr. Blair must have been delighted to find that the laws of the
epic, which he so often explained to his class in Edinburgh University,
were minutely observed by the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without
suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic poems had come partly
from himself.

The belief that Celtic literature is essentially and eternally
melancholy,--a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold,
also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian. Here again theory
showed the way to practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic poems is not
the melancholy of the Celt, but a melancholy compounded of many simples,
and extracted from works that were held in high esteem in the eighteenth
century--Young's _Night Thoughts_, Blair's _Grave_, Gray's _Bard_, and
the soliloquies of Milton's Satan.

Macpherson was soon challenged, and his whole life was passed in a brawl
of controversy. Two famous men dismissed him contemptuously. Dr.
Johnson, who knew what honesty means among scholars, treated him as an
impudent impostor. Wordsworth, who knew what s