to publish a
collection he has of these specimens of antiquity, if it be antiquity;
but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I
was so struck, so _extasie_ with their infinite beauty, that I writ into
Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language for a
man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his correspondence of about
this date is filled with references to Ossian which enable the modern
reader to understand in part the excitement that the book created among
Gray's contemporaries. The letters that he got from MacPherson were
unconvincing, "ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, calculated to deceive, and yet
not cunning enough to do it cleverly." The external evidence disposed
him to believe the poems counterfeit; but the impression which they made
was such that he was "resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the
Devil and the Kirk. It is impossible to convince me that they were
invented by the same man that writes me these letters. On the other
hand, it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he
should be able to translate them so admirably."

On August 7 he writes to Mason that the Erse fragments have been
published five weeks ago in Scotland, though he had not received his copy
till the last week. "I continue to think them genuine, though my reasons
for believing the contrary are rather stronger than ever." David Hume,
who afterward became skeptical as to their authenticity, wrote to Gray,
assuring him that these poems were in everybody's mouth in the Highlands,
and had been handed down from father to son, from an age beyond all
memory and tradition. Gray's final conclusion is very much the same with
that of the general public, to which the Ossianic question is even yet a
puzzle. "I remain still in doubt about the authenticity of these poems,
tho' inclining rather to believe them genuine in spite of the world.
Whether they are the inventions of antiquity, or of a modern Scotchman,
either case is to me alike unaccountable. _Je m'y perds._"

We are more concerned here with the impression which MacPherson's books,
taking them just as they stand, made upon their contemporary Europe, than
with the history of the controversy to which they gave rise, and which is
still unsettled after more than a century and a quarter of discussion.
Nevertheless, as this controversy began immediately upon their
publication, and had reference not only to the authenticity o