half
century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These,
however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found,
or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the
Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his
amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to
transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible,
which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent
accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any
further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known,
for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson's original
collections followed his own manuscript. This, after being at one time
in the Advocates' Library, has now utterly disappeared. Mr. Campbell
thinks that under this double process of distillation--a copy by
MacPherson and then a copy by Ross--"the ancient form of the language, if
it was ancient, could hardly survive."[17] "What would become of
Chaucer," he asks, "so maltreated and finally spelt according to modern
rules of grammar and orthography? I have found by experience that an
alteration in 'spelling' may mean an entire change of construction and
meaning, and a substitution of whole words."

But the Gaelic text of 1807 was attacked in more vital points than its
spelling. It was freely charged with being an out-and-out fabrication, a
translation of MacPherson's English prose into modern Gaelic. This
question is one which must be settled by Gaelic scholars, and these still
disagree. In 1862 Mr. Campbell wrote: "When the Gaelic 'Fingal,'
published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which
purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior.
It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance
which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English, as
something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation
from MacPherson's English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet[18]
then alive, able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call
'full-sense verses.'" The general testimony is that MacPherson's own
knowledge of Gaelic was imperfect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole
matter--in 1862--is as follows: "My theory then is, that about the
beginning of the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth, or
earlier, Highland bards may