SOURCE: "'Those Scotch Imposters and their Cabal': Ossian and the Scottish Enlightenment," in Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 1, Roger L. Emerson, Gilles Girard, Roseann Runte, eds., The University of Western Ontario 1982, pp. 55-63.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1980, Sher argues that Macpherson's "translations" of Gaelic poetry were in some part the product of a group of literary figures in Edinburgh with whom Macpherson was associated and who provided the financial and intellectual support that made the project possible.

Although the name of Ossian was heard a great deal during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it has since become little more than a historical curiosity. We are amazed and amused that so many intelligent, welleducated people could have sincerely believed that the works of Ossian were both completely authentic and (what is perhaps more astounding...