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Updated: May 5, 2025
I am not going to criticise Macpherson's Ossian here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of Macpherson's Ossian she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no objection.
These, sent to an Irish scholar, had sufficed to identify the ballad with one printed in Miss Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, a characteristic production of the latter days of the eighteenth century, when Macpherson, with his adaptation of the Ossianic poems, and Bishop Percy, with his gathering of old English ballads, had set a fashion soon to culminate in Scott's great achievement.
Johnson, demanded to see the original manuscripts, and when Macpherson refused to produce them, the Ossianic poems were branded as a forgery; nevertheless they had enormous success. Macpherson was honored as a literary explorer; he was given an official position, carrying a salary for life; and at his death, in 1796, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
I must, however, mention that the last verse of the sixteenth page is one of the most elegant compliments I have ever seen. I must likewise notice that beautiful paragraph beginning "The gleaming lake," etc. I dare not go into the particular beauties of the last two paragraphs, but they are admirably fine, and truly Ossianic. I must beg your pardon for this lengthened scrawl.
Come, I told you this was but trumpery conversation for thinking people and now I have my hand on the Ossianic Controversy." "I beg your pardon," said Lovel; "I am going to appear very silly and changeable in your eyes, Mr. Oldbuck but you seemed to think Sir Arthur might in civility expect a call from me?" "Psha! psha!
"It is the sort of stuff that we all of us wrote more or less after we left school," said the Baron with a bored expression he was acting his part of arbiter of taste who has seen everything. "We used to deal in Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and warriors who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads.
"You're devilish scrupulous, Gus," said Bob, who, if left to himself, would have stuck in the names of the heathen gods and goddesses, or borrowed his directors from the Ossianic chronicles, rather than have delayed the prospectus. "Where the mischief are we to find the men? I can think of no others likely to go the whole hog; can you?"
Then there is the Irish Archæological perhaps the most learned of all with its casual assistants, the Ossianic, the Celtic, and the Iona. The Ælfric may be counted their ethnical rival, as dealing with the productions of the Anglo-Saxon enemies of the Celt. The Camden professes, as we have seen, to be general to the British Empire.
So difficult is it to judge of the real bearings of objects in this clear air, which in fact is less favourable to the display of the grander features of nature, than our own misty Ossianic climate.
Symons's The Romantic Movement in English Poetry. Beers's English Romanticism. Phelps's Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement. Nutt's Ossian and Ossianic Literature. Jusserand's The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare. Cross's The Development of the English Novel. Dobson's Samuel Richardson. Dobson's Henry Fielding. Godden's Henry Fielding, a Memoir. Gosse's Life of Gray.
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