ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names
belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and
undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of
MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's
text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of
Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's,
1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free
translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787)
under the title "Sean Dàna," Smith frankly took liberties with his
originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he
made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase
rested, he enabled the public to see how far his "Ancient Lays," were
really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his
own editorial labors.[24]

Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to
"amalgamate with the literature of this island" needs some
qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a
formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of
explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation
from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the
verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work
upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the
ancient classical literatures, _e.g._, have always worked; or as Italian
and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was
practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars. Whatever its
beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for
it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had
never been what the Germans called a _Kultursprache_; and now it was the
idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly