giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them; and should
wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some slight idea
of the language, the measures and the rhythm. Is there anything known of
the author or authors; and of what antiquity are they supposed to be? Is
there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching it?"

In a letter to Shonehewer (June 29,) he writes: "I have received another
Scotch packet with a third specimen . . . full of nature and noble wild
imagination."[2] And in the month following he writes to Wharton: "If
you have seen Stonehewer, he has probably told you of my old Scotch
(rather Irish) poetry. I am gone mad about them. They are said to be
translations (literal and in prose) from the _Erse_ tongue, done by one
MacPherson, a young clergyman in the Highlands. He means to publish a
collection he has of these specimens of antiquity, if it be antiquity;
but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I
was so struck, so _extasié_ with their infinite beauty, that I writ into
Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language for a
man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his correspondence of about
this date is filled with references to Ossian which enable the modern
reader to understand in part the excitement that the book created among
Gray's contemporaries. The letters that he got from MacPherson were
unconvincing, "ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, calculated to deceive, and yet
not cunning enough to do it cleverly." The external evidence disposed
him to believe the poems counterfeit; but the impression which they made
was such that he was "resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the
Devil and the Kirk. It is impossible to convince me that they were
invented by the same man that writes me these letters. On the other
hand, it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he
should be able to translate them so admirably."