a motley assemblage from all quarters; but
he is so fond of making out parallel passages as to call poor Macpherson
to account for his '_ands_' and his '_buts_!' and he has weakened his
argument by conducting it as if he thought that every striking
resemblance was a _conscious_ plagiarism. It is enough that the
coincidences are too remarkable for its being probable or possible that
they could arise in different minds without communication between them.
Now as the Translators of the Bible, and Shakspeare, Milton, and Pope,
could not be indebted to Macpherson, it follows that he must have owed
his fine feathers to them; unless we are prepared gravely to assert,
with Madame de Stael, that many of the characteristic beauties of our
most celebrated English Poets are derived from the ancient Fingallian;
in which case the modern translator would have been but giving back to
Ossian his own.--It is consistent that Lucien Buonaparte, who could
censure Milton for having surrounded Satan in the infernal regions with
courtly and regal splendour, should pronounce the modern Ossian to be
the glory of Scotland;--a country that has produced a Dunbar, a
Buchanan, a Thomson, and a Burns! These opinions are of ill-omen for the
Epic ambition of him who has given them to the world.

Yet, much as those 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. He had perceived, from the successful trials which he
himself had made in literary forgery, how few critics were able to
distinguish between a real ancient medal and a counterfeit of modern
manufacture; and he set himself to the work of filling a magazine with
_Saxon Poems_,--counterparts of those of Ossian, as like his as one of
his misty stars is to another. 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!--I have already
stated how much Germany is indebted to this latter work; and for our ow