Wordsworth’s assertion of the failure of MacPherson’s “Ossian” to “amalgamate with the literature of this island” needs some qualifications.  That it did not enter into English literature in a formative way, as Percy’s ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of explanation.  In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the verse and diction of English poetry directly.  It could not even work upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the ancient classical literatures, e.g., have always worked; or as Italian and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars.  Whatever its beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for it was marked with the stigma of barbarism.  In its palmiest days it had never been what the Germans called a Kultursprache; and now it was the idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses.

Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them.  And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson’s prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm with which his “wild paraphrases,” as Mr. Campbell calls them, were received by the public.  The age was tired of polish, of wit, of over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past.  Suddenly here was what it had been waiting for—­“a tale of the times of old”; and the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson’s sentences, with the peculiar manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited well with his matter.  “Men had been talking under their breath, and in a mincing dialect so long,” says Leslie Stephen, “that they were easily gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and natural sentiment.”

The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful.  Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian.  A generation after the appearance of the “Fragments” we find the youthful Coleridge alluding to “Ossian” in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793), which contains two verse imitations of the same, as ecce signum: 

    “How long will ye round me be swelling,
      O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea? 
    Not always in caves was my dwelling,
      Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree,” etc., etc.[26]