King.[5] His shining
shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world
is silent and dark, and the traveler sees some ghost sporting in the
beam. Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks. A
blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin
appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores
unknown are trembling at veering winds."[6]

The authenticity of the "Fragments" of 1760 had not passed without
question; but MacPherson brought forward entire epics which, he asserted,
were composed by a Highland bard of the third century, handed down
through ages by oral tradition, and finally committed--at least in
part--to writing and now extant in manuscripts in his possession, there
ensued at once a very emphatic expression of incredulity. Among the most
truculent of the disbelievers was Dr. Johnson. He had little liking for
Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism. In his tour of the
Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, he showed an insensibility, and
even a kind of hostility, to the wild beauties of Highland scenery, which
gradually affects the reader with a sense of the ludicrous as he watches
his sturdy figure rolling along on a small Highland pony by sequestered
Loch Ness, with its fringe of birch trees, or between the prodigious
mountains that frown above Glensheal; or seated in a boat off the Mull of
Cantyre, listening to the Erse songs of the rowers:

"Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides."

"Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "owned he was now in a scene of as wild
nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate
observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson:
'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look
at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top, but one
side of it is larger than the other.' Another mountain I called immense.
Johnson: 'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'"

Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of MacPherson's "Ossian," but he
denied it any poetic merit. Dr. Blair having asked him whether he
thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems, he
answered: "Yes, sir: many men, many women and many children." "Sir," he
exclaimed to Reynolds, "a man might write such stuff forever, if he would
_abandon_ his mind to it." To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland