In Byron's "House of Idleness" (1807), published when he was a Cambridge
undergraduate, is a piece of prose founded on the episode of Nisus and
Euryalus in the "Aeneid" and entitled "The Death of Calmar and Orla--An
Imitation of MacPherson's Ossian." "What form rises on the roar of
clouds? Whose dark ghost gleams in the red stream of tempests? His
voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief of Orthona. . .
Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed Morla," etc. After reading several
pages of such stuff, one comes to feel that Byron could do this sort of
thing about as well as MacPherson himself; and indeed, that Johnson was
not so very far wrong when he said that anyone could do it if he would
abandon his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic verbiage in a
number of pieces which he pretended to have translated from the Saxon:
"Ethelgar," "Kenrick," "Cerdick," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a
composition which he called "Godred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and
one from the ancient British, which he entitled "The Heilas." He did not
catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage or two from
"Kenrick" will show: "Awake, son of Eldulph! Thou that sleepest on the
white mountain, with the fairest of women; no more pursue the dark brown
wolf: arise from the mossy bank of the falling waters: let thy garments
be stained in blood, and the streams of life discolor thy girdle. . .
Cealwulf of the high mountain, who viewed the first rays of the morning
star, swift as the flying deer, strong as a young oak, fiery as an
evening wolf, drew his sword; glittering like the blue vapors in the
valley of Horso; terrible as the red lightning bursting from the
dark-brown clouds, his swift bark rode over the foaming waves like the
wind in the tempest."

In a note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved
Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained,