collected in the Highlands, and alleged that his work was but a translation of Gaelic manuscripts.  Whether the work of itself would have attracted attention is doubtful; but the fact that an abundance of literary material might be awaiting discovery led to an interest such as now attends the opening of an Egyptian tomb, and a subscription was promptly raised in Edinburgh to send Macpherson through the Highlands to collect more “manuscripts.”  The result was the epic Fingal (1762), “that lank and lamentable counterfeit of poetry,” as Swinburne calls it, which the author professed to have translated from the Gaelic of the poet Ossian.  Its success was astonishing, and Macpherson followed it up with Temora (1763), another epic in the same strain.  In both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times magnificent; the language is a kind of chanting, bombastic prose: 

Now Fingal arose in his might and thrice he reared his voice.  Cromla answered around, and the sons of the desert stood still.  They bent their red faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of Fingal.  He came like a cloud of rain in the days of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields expect the shower.  Swaran beheld the terrible king of Morven, and stopped in the midst of his course.  Dark he leaned on his spear rolling his red eyes around.  Silent and tall he seemed as an oak on the banks of Lubar, which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven.  His thousands pour around the hero, and the darkness of battle gathers on the hill.[208]

The publication of this gloomy, imaginative work produced a literary storm.  A few critics, led by Dr. Johnson, demanded to see the original manuscripts, and when Macpherson refused to produce them,[209] the Ossianic poems were branded as a forgery; nevertheless they had enormous success.  Macpherson was honored as a literary explorer; he was given an official position, carrying a salary for life; and at his death, in 1796, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.  Blake, Burns, and indeed most of the poets of the age were influenced by this sham poetry.  Even the scholarly Gray was deceived and delighted with “Ossian”; and men as far apart as Goethe and Napoleon praised it immoderately.

THOMAS CHATTERTON (1752-1770).  This “marvelous boy,” to whom Keats dedicated his “Endymion,” and who is celebrated in Shelley’s “Adonais,” is one of the saddest and most interesting figures of the romantic revival.  During his childhood he haunted the old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, in Bristol, where he was fascinated by the mediaeval air of the place, and especially by one old chest, known as Canynge’s coffer, containing musty documents which had been preserved for three hundred years.  With strange, uncanny intentness the child pored over these relics of the past, copying them instead of his writing book, until he could imitate not only the