spurious in the book as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which, on the strength of MacPherson’s ‘Ossian,’ she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia—­Ireland; I make no objection.  But there will still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it; and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it.  Woody Morven, and echoing Lora, and Selma with its silent halls!  We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us!  Choose any one of the better passages in MacPherson’s ‘Ossian,’ and you can see, even at this time of day, what an apparition of newness and of power such a strain must have been in the eighteenth century.”

But from this same kind of internal evidence, Wordsworth draws just the opposite conclusion.  “The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition.  It traveled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its course through Europe upon the breath of popular applause.[12]. . .  Open this far-famed book!  I have done so at random, and the beginning of the epic poem ‘Temora,’ in eight books, presents itself.  ’The blue waves of Ullin roll in light.  The green hills are covered with day.  Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze.  Gray torrents pour their noisy streams.  Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain.  The blue course of a stream is there.  On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha.  His spear supports the king:  the red eyes of his fear are sad.  Cormac rises on his soul with all his ghastly wounds. . .’  Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian.  From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious.  In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness.  In MacPherson’s work it is exactly the reverse:  everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct.  It will always be so when words are substituted for things.  To say that the characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which MacPherson defied. . .  Yet, much as these pretended treasures of antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the literature of the country.  No succeeding writer appears to have caught from them a ray of inspiration; no author in the least distinguished has ventured formally to imitate them, except the boy Chatterton, on their first appearance. . .  This incapability to amalgamate with the literature of the Island is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless.  Contrast, in this respect, the effect of MacPherson’s publication with the ‘Reliques’ of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in their pretensions.”