collecting and translating leaves little doubt that he had materials of
some kind; and that these consisted partly of old Gaelic manuscripts, and
partly of transcriptions taken down in Gaelic from the recitation of aged
persons in the Highlands. These testimonies may be read in the "Report
of the Committee of the Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.[13] It is
too voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled the point as to
the precise use which MacPherson made of his materials, whether, _i.e._,
he gave literal renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether he
manipulated them--and to what extent--by piecing fragments together,
lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, interpolating, modernizing, as Percy
did with his ballads. He was challenged to show his Gaelic manuscripts,
and Mr. Clerk says that he accepted the challenge. "He deposited the
manuscripts at his publishers', Beckett and De Hondt, Strand, London. He
advertised in the newspapers that he had done so; offered to publish them
if a sufficient number of subscribers came forward; and in the _Literary
Journal_ of the year 1784, Beckett certifies that the manuscripts had
lain in his shop for the space of a whole year."[14]

But this was more than twenty years after. Mr. Clerk does not show that
Johnson or Laing or Shaw or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson's numerous
critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew where the manuscripts
were to be seen; or that--being ignorant of Gaelic--it would have helped
them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent
conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to
it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the
purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, _e.g._, Dr. Johnson
was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of
the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and
Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from
old manuscripts. His copies, if he had them--and I believe him to have