"When Moran, one commissioned to explore
The distant seas, came running from the shore
And thus exclaimed--'Cuthullin, rise! The ships
Of snowy Lochlin hide the rolling deeps.
Innumerable foes the land invade,
And Swaran seems determined to succeed.'"

Whatever impressiveness belonged to MacPherson's cadenced prose was lost
in these metrical versions, which furnish a perfect _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. Homer
could not be put in any dress through which the beauty and interest of
the original would not appear. Still again, in 1786, "Fingal" was done
into heroics by a Mr. R. Hole, who varied his measures with occasional
ballad stanzas, thus:

"But many a fair shall melt with woe
At thy soft strain in future days,
And many a manly bosom glow,
Congenial to thy lofty lays."

These versions were all emitted in Scotland. But as late as 1814
"Fingal" appeared once more in verse, this time in London, and in a
variety of meters by Mr. George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed
the hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast "Ossian" into the
form of a metrical romance, like "Marmion" or "The Lay of the Last
Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six
Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33]
The passage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from
a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met
at the hall of a chieftain, on an October night, go out one after another