SOURCE: "The Age and the Race," in James Mac Pher-son: An Episode in Literature, David Nutt, 1905, pp. 1-32.

Below, Smart reviews the literary climate of the mid-eighteenth century, outlining the rise of Romanticism as both a rejection of Classicism and an embracing of nature. Smart maintains that Ossian's works were seen as the epitome of the ideals of the new Romantic movement, but that by the mid-nineteenth century the works were viewed as fraudulent.

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James Macpherson is a poet whose fame in his own epoch now astonishes posterity. He appeared at a time of transition; an old school was going out, a new one coming in; and the new school made him one of its heroes and pioneers.

The classical literature of the early eighteenth century had passed its prime, and was dying, like all things, of its own limitations. The reaction against it which led to...