uestion."[35] But one thing is
sure: he has enriched the literature with public letters of rare sagacity,
extreme elegance of rhetoric and great logical force, and has presented a
problem always curious and interesting for future students,--not yet
solved, in spite of Mr. Chabot's recent book,[36] and every day becoming
more difficult of solution,--_Who was Junius_?

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE LITERARY FORGERS IN THE ANTIQUARIAN AGE.

The Eighteenth Century. James Macpherson. Ossian. Thomas Chatterton.
His Poems. The Verdict. Suicide. The Cause.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

The middle of the eighteenth century is marked as a period in which, while
other forms of literature flourished, there arose a taste for historic
research. Not content with the _actual_ in poetry and essay and pamphlet,
there was a looking back to gather up a record of what England had done
and had been in the past, and to connect, in logical relation, her former
with her latter glory. It was, as we have seen, the era of her great
historians, Hume, Gibbon, and Robertson, who, upon the chronicles, and the
abundant but scattered material, endeavored to construct philosophic
history; it was the day of her greatest moralists, Adam Smith, Tucker, and
Paley, and of research in metaphysics and political economy. In this
period Bishop Percy collected the ancient English ballads, and also
historic poems from the Chinese and the Runic; in it Warton wrote his
history of poetry. Dr. Johnson, self-reliant and laborious, was producing
his dictionary, and giving limits and coherence to the language. Mind was
on the alert, not only subsidizing the present, but looking curiously into
the past. I have ventured to call it the antiquarian age. In 1751, the
Antiquarian Society of London was firmly established; men began to collect
armor and relics: in this period grew up such an antiquary as Mr. Oldbuck,
who curiously sought out every relic of the Roman times,--armor, fosses,
and _praetoria_,--and found, with much that was real, many a fraud or
delusion. It was an age which, in the words of old Walter Charleton,
"despised the present as an innovation, and slighted the future, like the
madman who fell in love with Cleopatra."

There was manifestly a great temptation to adventurous men--with
sufficient learning, and with no high notion of honor--to creep into the
distant past; to enact, in mask and domino, its literary parts, and
endeavor to deceive an age a