soul with all his ghastly wounds. . .' Having had the good fortune to be
born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have
felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under
the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the
imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing
defined into absolute, independent singleness. In MacPherson's work it
is exactly the reverse: everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner
defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will
always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the
characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a
dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there
depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which
MacPherson defied. . . Yet, much as these pretended treasures of
antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the
literature of the country. No succeeding writer appears to have caught
from them a ray of inspiration; no author in the least distinguished has
ventured formally to imitate them, except the boy Chatterton, on their
first appearance. . . This incapability to amalgamate with the
literature of the Island is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the
book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to
demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. Contrast, in
this respect, the effect of MacPherson's publication with the 'Reliques'
of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in their pretensions."

Other critics have pointed out a similar indistinctness in the human
actors, no less than in the landscape features of "Fingal" and "Temora."
They have no dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all extremely
shadowy. "Poor, moaning, monotonous MacPherson" is Carlyle's
alliterative description of the translator of "Ossian"; and it must be
confessed that, in spite of the deep poetic feeling which pervades these