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Updated: May 24, 2025
They always git Ossian to sing 'Fly like a youthful hart or roe, over the hills where spices grow, an' I tell him he's too old; youthful harts an' roes don't fly over the hills wearin' spectacles, I tell him, but he'll go right on singin' it till they have to carry him up on the platform in a wheeled chair!" "You go to the Congregational church, don't you, Mrs. Popham?" asked Mrs. Carey.
My favourite authors are of the sentimental kind, such as Shenstone, particularly his Elegies; Thomson; Man of Feeling, a book I prize next to the Bible; Man of the World; Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey; Macpherson's Ossian, etc.; these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct, and 'tis incongruous 'tis absurd to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race he "who can soar above this little scene of things" can he descend to mind the paltry concerns about which the terrae-filial race fret, and fume, and vex themselves!
He was not a dunce, but an "incorrigibly idle imp," and in spite of his lameness he was better at games than at lessons. In some ways, owing to his idleness, he was behind his fellows, on the other hand he had read far more than they. And now he read everything he could, in season and out of season. Pope's Homer, Shakespeare, Ossian, and especially Spenser were among his favorites.
'You lie, says I. With that he ups with a lump of a two year old, and lets drive at me. I outs with my bread-earner, and gives it him up to Lamprey in the bread-basket." To make this intelligible to the English, some comments are necessary. Let us follow the text, step by step, and it will afford our readers, as Lord Kames says of Blair's Dissertation on Ossian, a delicious morsel of criticism.
'But we have neither silver, nor gold, nor herds, O Fionn, answered the two young men. 'I want none of these, replied Fionn; 'the payment I ask is but the head of a warrior, or a handful of berries from the magic tree of Dooros. 'Take counsel from me, cried Ossian, 'for it is no light matter to bring to Fionn that which he asks of you.
You cannot read now without amazement the books which used to enchant you as a child. I remember when I used to read Hervey's "Meditations" with great delight. That was when I was about five years old. A year or two later I greatly affected Macpherson's translation of Ossian. It is not so very long since I felt the liveliest interest in Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy."
Then in England people began to say that there never had been an Ossian at all, and that Macpherson had invented both the poems and all the people that they were about. For the English knew little of the Highlanders and their customs. Even after the '15 and the '45 people in the south knew little about the north and those who lived there.
At the moment when the regiment, with arms loaded, was about to march upon the Rue Aumaire, Ossian Dumas went up to his captain, a brave and veteran officer, with whom he was a favorite, and declared that he would not march a step farther, that the deed of the 2d of December was a crime, that Louis Bonaparte was a traitor, that it was for them, soldiers, to maintain the oath which Bonaparte violated; and that, as for himself, he would not lend his sword to the butchery of the Republic.
I cry 'Ai! ai! as if I were a chorus, and all vainly. For, you see, arguing about it will only convince you of my obstinacy, and not a bit of Homer's supremacy. Ossian has wrapt you in a cloud, a fog, a true Scotch mist. You have caught cold in the critical faculty, perhaps. At any rate, I can't see a bit more of your reasonableness than I can see of Fingal. Sic transit!
This is a curious mistake, of a kind which lesser critics have often repeated. Perhaps George III. had nothing to do with literature; but his accession immediately preceded, and may even, as the beginning of a pure English régime, have done something to produce, numerous appearances of the Romantic revival Percy's Reliques, Hurd's Essays, Macpherson's Ossian, The Castle of Otranto, and others.
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