An astounding and epochal event was the publication (1760 ff.) of the poems attributed to Ossian.  Their “editor and translator,” James Macpherson, author of a forgotten sentimental epic, alleged that Ossian was a Gaelic poet of the third century A.D., who sang the loves and wars of the heroes of his people, brave warriors fighting the imperial legions of Rome; and that his poems had been orally transmitted until now, fifteen centuries later, they had been taken down from the lips of Scotch peasants.  It was a fabrication as ingenious as brazen.  As a matter of fact, Macpherson had found only an insignificant portion of his extensive work in popular ballads; and what little he had found he had expanded and changed out of all semblance to genuine ancient legend.  Both the guiding motive of his prose-poem (it is his as truly as King Lear is Shakespeare’s), and the furore of welcome which greeted it, may be understood by recalling the position of the sentimental school on the eve of its appearance.  The sentimentalists were maintaining that civilization had corrupted tastes, morals, and poetry, that it had perverted Man from his instinctive goodness, and that only by a return to communion with Nature could humanity and poetry be redeemed.  But all this was based merely on philosophic theory, and could find no confirmation in history or literature:  history knew of no innocent savages; and even as unsophisticated literature as Homer was then supposed to be, disclosed no heroes perfect in the sentimental virtues.

Ossian appeared; and the truth of sentimentalism seemed historically established.  For here was poetry of the loftiest tone, composed in the unlearned Dark Ages, and answering the highest expectations concerning poetry inspired by Nature only. (Was not a distinguished Professor of Rhetoric saying, “Ossian’s poetry, more perhaps than that of any other writer, deserves to be styled the poetry of the heart"?) And here was the record of a nature-people whose conduct stood revealed as flawless.  “Fingal,” Macpherson himself accommodatingly pointed out, “exercised every manly virtue in Caledonia while Heliogabalus disgraced human nature in Rome.”  More than fifty years afterwards Byron compared Homer’s Hector, greatly to his disadvantage, with Ossian’s Fingal:  the latter’s conduct was, in his admirer’s words, “uniformly illustrious and great, without one mean or inhuman action to tarnish the splendor of his fame.”  The benevolent magnanimity of the heroes, the sweet sensibility of the heroines, their harmony with Nature’s moods (traits which Macpherson had supplied from his own imagination), were the very traits that won the enthusiasm of the public.  The poem in its turn stimulated the sentimentalism which had produced it; and henceforth the new school contended on even terms with the old.