ure of this island" needs some
qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a
formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of
explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation
from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the
verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work
upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the
ancient classical literatures, _e.g._, have always worked; or as Italian
and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was
practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars. Whatever its
beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for
it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had
never been what the Germans called a _Kultursprache_; and now it was the
idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly
becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses.

Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English
mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them.
And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson's
prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm
with which his "wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, were
received by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of
over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the
heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a
dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly
here was what it had been waiting for--"a tale of the times of old"; and
the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, with the peculiar
manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited
well with his matter. "Men had been talking under their breath, and in a
mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, "that they were easily
gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and
natural sentiment."

The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful.
Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except
Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after
the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alluding
to "Ossian" in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793),
which contain