From the barred visor of antiquity
    Reflected shines the eternal light of Truth
    As from a mirror.

And if they could not be found, they might be counterfeited.  This was undertaken by Doctor James Macpherson.  Catering to the spirit of the age, he reproduced the songs of Ossian and the lofty deeds of Fingal.

Again, we have referred, in an early part of this work, to the almost barren expanse in the highway of English literature from the death of Chaucer to the middle of the sixteenth century; this barrenness was due, as we saw, to the turbulence of those years—­civil war, misgovernment, a time of bloody action rather than peaceful authorship.  Here, too, was a great temptation for some gifted but oblique mind to supply a partial literature for that bare period; a literature which, entirely fabricated, should yet bear all the characteristics of the history, language, customs, manners, and religion of that time.

This attempt was made by Thomas Chatterton, an obscure, ill-educated lad, without means or friends, but who had a master-mind, and would have accomplished some great feat in letters, had he not died, while still very young, by his own hand.

Let us examine these frauds in succession:  we shall find them of double historic value, as literary efforts in one age designed to represent the literature of a former age.

JAMES MACPHERSON.—­James Macpherson was born at Ruthven, a village in Inverness-shire, in 1738.  Being intended for the ministry, he received a good preliminary education, and became early interested in the ancient Gaelic ballads and poetic fragments still floating about the Highlands of Scotland.  By the aid of Mr. John Home, the author of Douglas, and his friends Blair and Ferguson, he published, in 1760, a small volume of sixty pages entitled, Fragments of Ancient Poetry translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language.  They were heroic and harmonious, and were very well received:  he had catered to the very spirit of the age.  At first, there seemed to be no doubt as to their genuineness.  It was known to tradition that this northern Fingal had fought with Severus and Caracalla, on the banks of the Carun, and that blind Ossian had poured forth a flood of song after the fight, and made the deeds immortal.  And now these songs and deeds were echoing in English ears,—­the thrumming of the harp which told of “the stream of those olden years, where they have so long hid, in their mist, their many-colored sides.” (Cathloda, Duan III.)

So enthusiastically were these poems received, that a subscription was raised to enable Macpherson to travel in the Highlands, and collect more of this lingering and beautiful poetry.

Gray the poet, writing to William Mason, in 1760, says:  “These poems are in everybody’s mouth in the Highlands; have been handed down from father to son.  We have therefore set on foot a subscription of a guinea or two apiece, in order to enable Mr. Macpherson to recover this poem (Fingal), and other fragments of antiquity.”