none--are nothing. Where are thee manuscripts? They can be shown if
they exist, but they were never shown. _De non existentibus et non
apparentibus eadem est ratio._" And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a
dinner at Sir Alexander Gordon's, Johnson said: "If the poems were really
translated, they were certainly first written down. Let Mr. MacPherson
deposit the manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where there
are people who can judge; and if the professors certify their
authenticity, then there will be an end of the controversy. If he
does not take this obvious and easy method, he gives the best reason to
doubt."

Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manuscripts casts the
gravest suspicion on MacPherson's good faith. A thousand pounds were
finally subscribed to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts. But
these MacPherson never published. He sent the manuscripts which were
ultimately published in 1807 to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he
left one thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of printing
them. After MacPherson's death in 1796, Mr. Mackenzie "delayed the
publication from day to day, and at last handed over the manuscripts to
the Highland Society,"[15] which had them printed in 1807, nearly a half
century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These,
however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found,
or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the
Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his
amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to
transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible,
which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent
accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any
further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known,
for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson's original