her epic in the same strain. In
both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to
his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times
magnificent; the language is a kind of chanting, bombastic prose:

Now Fingal arose in his might and thrice he reared his voice. Cromla
answered around, and the sons of the desert stood still. They bent their
red faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of Fingal. He came like a cloud
of rain in the days of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields
expect the shower. Swaran beheld the terrible king of Morven, and stopped
in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear rolling his red
eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed as an oak on the banks of Lubar,
which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. His
thousands pour around the hero, and the darkness of battle gathers on the
hill.[208]

The publication of this gloomy, imaginative work produced a literary storm.
A few critics, led by Dr. Johnson, demanded to see the original
manuscripts, and when Macpherson refused to produce them,[209] the Ossianic
poems were branded as a forgery; nevertheless they had enormous success.
Macpherson was honored as a literary explorer; he was given an official
position, carrying a salary for life; and at his death, in 1796, he was
buried in Westminster Abbey. Blake, Burns, and indeed most of the poets of
the age were influenced by this sham poetry. Even the scholarly Gray was
deceived and delighted with "Ossian"; and men as far apart as Goethe and
Napoleon praised it immoderately.

THOMAS CHATTERTON (1752-1770). This "marvelous boy," to whom Keats
dedicated his "Endymion," and who is celebrated in Shelley's "Adonais," is
one of the saddest and most interesting figures of the romantic revival.
During his childhood he haunted the old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, in
Bristol, where he was fascinated by the mediaeval air of the place, and
especially by one old chest, known as Canynge's coffer, containing musty
documents which had been preserved for three hundred years. With strange,
uncanny intentness the child pored over these relics of the past, copying
them instead of his writing book, until he could imitate not only the
spelling and language but even the handwriting of the original. Soon after
the "Ossian" forgeries appeared, Chatterton began to produce documents,
apparently very old, containing mediaeval poems, legends, and