to observe the weather, and return to report their observations, each
ending with the refrain "Receive me from the night, my friends." The
whole episode is singularly arresting, and carries a conviction of
reality too often wanting in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection.

Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by the "Fragments" as Gray
had been. He wrote to Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural
poetry, like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the synonym
for an echo--"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all
doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had
disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously
capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he
became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem,
that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, in a
letter dated March, 1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs.
Montagu--the founder of the Blue Stocking Club--still "holds her feast of
shells in her feather dressing-room."

The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer welcome abroad than at home. He
was rendered into French,[35] German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish,
and possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great lover of Ossian, and
carried about with him a copy of Cesarotti's Italian version. A
resemblance has been fancied between MacPherson's manner and the
grandiloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dispatches.[36] In
Germany Ossian naturally took most strongly. He was translated into
hexameters by a Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis[37] and produced many
imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen
der Völker" (1778-79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay
"Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker" written in 1773. Schiller was
one of the converts; Klopstock and his circle called themselves "bards";