SOURCE: "Fool's Gold: The Highland Treasures of Mac-Pherson's Ossian," in ELH, Vol 53, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 567-91.

In the following essay, Murphy places both Macpherson's accomplishments and the controversy surrounding them in the context of the Scottish sense of national heritage in the eighteenth century.

James MacPherson was once a famous man, famous for translating Ossian's poems. If he is remembered now, it is for forging the Ossian poems, with the emphasis on the forgery rather than the poetry; but mostly he is hardly remembered at all. If literary memory is founded on quality, then the turgid prose of these "poems," with its thick syntax and grand, vague gestures, certainly encourages forgetfulness. But if we think of him as a literary event, as a writer who generated a great deal of interest (regardless of the source of that interest), then he seems more deserving of attention. The Ossian books...