sound was like a thousand streams that meet in Cona’s vale, when, after a stormy night, they turn their dark eddies beneath the pale light of the morn.  As the dark shades of autumn fly over hills of grass; so, gloomy, dark, successive came the chiefs of Lochlin’s[4] echoing woods.  Tall as the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the King.[5] His shining shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world is silent and dark, and the traveler sees some ghost sporting in the beam.  Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks.  A blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist.  The sons of Erin appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores unknown are trembling at veering winds."[6]

The authenticity of the “Fragments” of 1760 had not passed without question; but MacPherson brought forward entire epics which, he asserted, were composed by a Highland bard of the third century, handed down through ages by oral tradition, and finally committed—­at least in part—­to writing and now extant in manuscripts in his possession, there ensued at once a very emphatic expression of incredulity.  Among the most truculent of the disbelievers was Dr. Johnson.  He had little liking for Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism.  In his tour of the Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, he showed an insensibility, and even a kind of hostility, to the wild beauties of Highland scenery, which gradually affects the reader with a sense of the ludicrous as he watches his sturdy figure rolling along on a small Highland pony by sequestered Loch Ness, with its fringe of birch trees, or between the prodigious mountains that frown above Glensheal; or seated in a boat off the Mull of Cantyre, listening to the Erse songs of the rowers: 

    “Breaking the silence of the seas
    Among the farthest Hebrides.”

“Dr. Johnson,” says Boswell, “owned he was now in a scene of as wild nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate observations.  ‘There,’ said I, ‘is a mountain like a cone.’  Johnson:  ’No, sir.  It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so.  It is indeed pointed at the top, but one side of it is larger than the other.’  Another mountain I called immense.  Johnson:  ‘No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.’”

Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of MacPherson’s “Ossian,” but he denied it any poetic merit.  Dr. Blair having asked him whether he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems, he answered:  “Yes, sir:  many men, many women and many children.”  “Sir,” he exclaimed to Reynolds, “a man might write such stuff forever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”  To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland hosts, he said:  “I look upon MacPherson’s ‘Fingal’ to be as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with.”  Johnson’s arguments were mostly a priori.  He asserted that the ancient Gael were a barbarous people, incapable of producing poetry of the kind.  Long epics, such as “Fingal” and “Temora,” could not be preserved in memory and handed down by word of mouth.  As to ancient manuscripts which MacPherson pretended to have, there was not a Gaelic manuscript in existence a hundred years old.