Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, by W. Shaw, A.M., published in London in 1781, also condemned Macpherson's work as spurious; while Pinkerton, finding that the authenticity of Ossian would disprove some of his cherished theories regarding the early races of Scotland, made occasion in the second volume of his history to discredit the poems as forgeries. Of later writers Lord Macaulay has inherited the anti-Scottish prejudices of Dr. Johnson with doubled virulence, and this to the suppression of fact in at least one instance. In the thirteenth chapter of his history he forgets the existence of Johnson, and describes an enthusiasm for things Scottish existing at the time of Ossian's publication. That enthusiasm only arose forty years later with the rising star of Walter Scott.
Time itself has answered many of these attacks. Dr. Johnson's declaration in his Journey to the Western Islands that "the poems of Ossian never existed in any other form than that which we have seen," and that "the editor or author never could show the original, nor can it be shewn by any other," was refuted by the publication, already referred to, of the Gaelic originals in 1807.[1] Mr.
- ↑ The Rev. M. Clerk of Kilmallie in the introduction to his new translation of Ossian (1870), quotes an advertise-
