ersions were all emitted in Scotland. But as late as 1814
"Fingal" appeared once more in verse, this time in London, and in a
variety of meters by Mr. George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed
the hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast "Ossian" into the
form of a metrical romance, like "Marmion" or "The Lay of the Last
Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six
Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33]
The passage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from
a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met
at the hall of a chieftain, on an October night, go out one after another
to observe the weather, and return to report their observations, each
ending with the refrain "Receive me from the night, my friends." The
whole episode is singularly arresting, and carries a conviction of
reality too often wanting in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection.

Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by the "Fragments" as Gray
had been. He wrote to Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural
poetry, like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the synonym
for an echo--"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all
doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had
disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously
capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he
became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem,
that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, in a
letter dated March, 1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs.
Montagu--the founder of the Blue Stocking Club--still "holds her feast of
shells in her feather dressing-room."

The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer welcome abroad than at home. He
was rendered into French,[35] German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish,
and possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great lover of Ossian, and
carried about with him a copy of Cesarotti's Italian version. A
resemblance has been fancied between MacPherson's manner and the
grandiloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dispatches.[36] In
Germany Ossian naturally took most strongly. He was translated into
hexameters by a Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis[37] and produced many
imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen
der Voelker" (1778-79) and