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implicity means in poetry, declared that all the imagery of the poems is false and spurious. But the whole question early became a national quarrel, and the honor of Scotland was involved in it. There are signs that Macpherson would gladly have escaped from the storm he had raised. Aided by his early literary success, he became a prosperous man, held a well-paid post at court, entered Parliament, and was pensioned by the government. Still the controversy persisted. He had found it easy to take up a haughty attitude towards those hostile critics who had doubted his good faith and had asked him to produce his Gaelic originals. But now the demand for the originals came from his champions and friends, who desired to place the fame of Scotland's oldest and greatest poet on a sure foundation. He wriggled on the hook, and more than once timidly hinted that the poems owed not a little to the poetic genius of the translator. But this half- hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a part of his fame stirred the Caledonian enthusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last, when he was no longer able to restrain his supporters, the wretched Macpherson found no escape but one. In middle age, some twenty years after his first appearance on the poetic horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and an imperfect knowledge of the Gaelic tongue, to forge the originals. In 1807, eleven years after his death, these were at last published. The progress of genuine Celtic scholarship during the succeeding century did the rest; and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and vapors which were the inspiration of his Muse. {78} The poems of Ossian are only one, though perhaps the most signal, instance of the forgeries which prevailed like an epidemic at the time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these, like Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, were little better than cold-blooded mercenary frauds. Others, like Chatterton's Rowley Poems and Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, are full of the zest and delight of play-acting. Even Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_, though it is free from the reproach of forgery, is touched by the same spirit. The severe morality of scholarship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or modern matter. Scholars are the trustees of poets; but where this trust is undertaken by men who are poets themselves, there is usually a good deal of gaiety and exuberance in its performance. I have now traced some of the neglec
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