In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard, whom tradition placed in the 3d century.  Macpherson said that he made his version—­including two complete epics, Fingal and Temora—­from Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands.  A fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these remains.  Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic.  Of the MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap remained:  the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in Macpherson’s handwriting or in that of his secretaries.

But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they made a deep impression at the time.  Napoleon admired them greatly, and Goethe inserted passages from the “Songs of Selma” in his Sorrows of Werther.  Macpherson composed—­or translated—­them in an abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the prophecies of Isaiah.  They filled the minds of their readers with images of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain torrent, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal.

“A tale of the times of old!”

“Why, thou wanderer unseen!  Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why, thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear?  I hear no distant roar of streams!  No sound of the harp from the rock!  Come, thou huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard.  I look forward to Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where Fingal decends from Ocean, from the roar of winds.  Few are the heroes of Morven in a land unknown.”

Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature.  His father had been sexton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy’s sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings.  He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible.  He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry.  When only eleven years old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th century.  Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff’s.  The Rowley poems included two tragedies, Aella and Goddwyn, two cantos of a long poem on the Battle of Hastings, and a number of ballads and minor pieces.  Chatterton