James Macpherson is best remembered for the controversy surrounding his "translations" of the poet Ossian--a controversy yet to be resolved to universal satisfaction. One of several infamous "forgers" of the late eighteenth century, he has seemed to modern scholars to represent--along with, most notably, Thomas Chatterton--the need to escape the restrictions that defined the poetry of the immediate past in a search for the alternate forms and materials available in less polished, more "primitive" verse. Central to Macpherson's work, however, is a sentiment he shared with Alexander Pope: a veneration of the epic form and a recognition of the cultural longing for a national heroic tradition. Macpherson claimed to have discovered the ancient British epics Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763) entire and in Gaelic. At the heart of the controversy that erupted almost immediately was the issue of nationalism: the English were reluctant to credit the "discovery" as significant in...