lready enthusiastic for antiquity.

Thus, in the third century, if we may believe the Scotch and Irish
traditions, there existed in Scotland a great chieftain named Fion na
Gael--modernized into Fingal--who fought with Cuthullin and the Irish
warriors, and whose exploits were, as late as the time of which we have
been speaking, the theme of rude ballads among the highlands and islands
of Scotland. To find and translate these ballads was charming and
legitimate work for the antiquarian; to counterfeit them, and call them by
the name of a bard of that period, was the great temptation to the
literary forger. Of such a bard, too, there was a tradition. As brave as
were the deeds of Fingal, their fame was not so great as that of his son
Ossian, who struck a lofty harp as he recounted his father's glory. Could
the real poems be found, they would verify the lines:

From the barred visor of antiquity
Reflected shines the eternal light of Truth
As from a mirror.

And if they could not be found, they might be counterfeited. This was
undertaken by Doctor James Macpherson. Catering to the spirit of the age,
he reproduced the songs of Ossian and the lofty deeds of Fingal.

Again, we have referred, in an early part of this work, to the almost
barren expanse in the highway of English literature from the death of
Chaucer to the middle of the sixteenth century; this barrenness was due,
as we saw, to the turbulence of those years--civil war, misgovernment, a
time of bloody action rather than peaceful authorship. Here, too, was a
great temptation for some gifted but oblique mind to supply a partial
literature for that bare period; a literature which, entirely fabricated,
should yet bear all the characteristics of the history, language, customs,
manners, and religion of that time.

This attempt was made by Thomas Chatterton, an obscure, ill-educated lad,
without means or friends, but who had a master-mind, and would have
accomplished some great feat in letters, had he not died, while still very
young, by his own hand.

Let us examine these frauds in succession: we shall find them of double
historic value, as literary efforts in one age designed to represent the
literature of a former age.

JAMES MACPHERSON.--James Macpherson was born at Ruthven, a village in
Inverness-shire, in 1738. Being intended for the ministry, he received a
good preliminary education, and became early interested in the ancient
Gaelic ballads and