becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses.

Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English
mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them.
And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson's
prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm
with which his "wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, were
received by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of
over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the
heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a
dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly
here was what it had been waiting for--"a tale of the times of old"; and
the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, with the peculiar
manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited
well with his matter. "Men had been talking under their breath, and in a
mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, "that they were easily
gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and
natural sentiment."

The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful.
Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except
Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after
the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alluding
to "Ossian" in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793),
which contains two verse imitations of the same, as _ecce signum_:

"How long will ye round me be swelling,
O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea?
Not always in caves was my dwelling,
Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree," etc., etc.[26]