hosts,
he said: "I look upon MacPherson's 'Fingal' to be as gross an imposition
as ever the world was troubled with." Johnson's arguments were mostly _a
priori_. He asserted that the ancient Gael were a barbarous people,
incapable of producing poetry of the kind. Long epics, such as "Fingal"
and "Temora," could not be preserved in memory and handed down by word of
mouth. As to ancient manuscripts which MacPherson pretended to have,
there was not a Gaelic manuscript in existence a hundred years old.

It is now quite well established that Dr. Johnson was wrong on all these
points. To say nothing of the Homeric poems, the ancient Finns,
Scandinavians, and Germans were as barbarous as the Gael; yet they
produced the Kalewala, the Edda, and the Nibelungen Lied. The Kalewala,
a poem of 22, 793 lines--as long as the Iliad--was transmitted orally
from a remote antiquity and first printed in 1849. As to Gaelic
manuscripts, there are over sixty in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh,
varying in age from three hundred to five hundred years.[7] There is,
_e.g._, the "Glenmasan Manuscript" of the year 1238, containing the story
of "Darthula,"[8] which is the groundwork of the same story in
MacPherson's "Ossian." There is the important "Dean of Lismore's Book,"
a manuscript collection made by Dean MacGregory of Lismore, Argyleshire,
between 1512 and 1529, containing 11,000 lines of Gaelic poetry, some of
which is attributed to Ossian or Oisin. One of the poems is identical in
substance with the first book of MacPherson's "Temora;" although Mr.
Campbell says, "There is not one line in the Dean's book that I can
identify with any line in MacPherson's Gaelic."[9]

Other objections to the authenticity of MacPherson's translations rested
upon internal evidence, upon their characteristics of thought and style.
It was alleged that the "peculiar tone of sentimental grandeur and
melancholy" which distinguishes them, is false to the spirit of all known
early poetry, and is a modern note. In particular, it was argued,
MacPherson's heroes are too sensitive to the wild and sublime in nature.
Professor William R. Sullivan, a high authority on Celtic literature,
says that in the genuine and undoubted remains of old Irish poetry
belonging to the Leinster or Finnian Cycle and ascribed to Oisin, there
is much detail in descriptions of arms, accouterments, and articles of
indoor use and ornament, but very little in descriptions of outward