nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate
observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson:
'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look
at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top, but one
side of it is larger than the other.' Another mountain I called immense.
Johnson: 'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'"

Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of MacPherson's "Ossian," but he
denied it any poetic merit. Dr. Blair having asked him whether he
thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems, he
answered: "Yes, sir: many men, many women and many children." "Sir," he
exclaimed to Reynolds, "a man might write such stuff forever, if he would
_abandon_ his mind to it." To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland 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