But this was more than twenty years after.  Mr. Clerk does not show that Johnson or Laing or Shaw or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson’s numerous critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew where the manuscripts were to be seen; or that—­being ignorant of Gaelic—­it would have helped them if they had known; and he admits that “MacPherson’s subsequent conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the purpose . . . is indefensible.”  In 1773 and 1775, e.g., Dr. Johnson was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts.  “The state of the question,” he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, “is this.  He and Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from old manuscripts.  His copies, if he had them—­and I believe him to have none—­are nothing.  Where are thee manuscripts?  They can be shown if they exist, but they were never shown. De non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem est ratio.” And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a dinner at Sir Alexander Gordon’s, Johnson said:  “If the poems were really translated, they were certainly first written down.  Let Mr. MacPherson deposit the manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where there are people who can judge; and if the professors certify their authenticity, then there will be an end of the controversy.  If he does not take this obvious and easy method, he gives the best reason to doubt.”

Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manuscripts casts the gravest suspicion on MacPherson’s good faith.  A thousand pounds were finally subscribed to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts.  But these MacPherson never published.  He sent the manuscripts which were ultimately published in 1807 to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he left one thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of printing them.  After MacPherson’s death in 1796, Mr. Mackenzie “delayed the publication from day to day, and at last handed over the manuscripts to the Highland Society,"[15] which had them printed in 1807, nearly a half century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These, however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found, or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the Highlands.  They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his amanuenses.  Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible, which is modern.  The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent accurately even MacPherson’s Gaelic.  Whether the transcriber took any further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known, for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson’s original collections followed his own manuscript.  This, after being at one time in the Advocates’ Library, has now utterly disappeared.  Mr. Campbell