To find and translate these ballads was charming and
legitimate work for the antiquarian; to counterfeit them, and call them by
the name of a bard of that period, was the great temptation to the
literary forger. Of such a bard, too, there was a tradition. As brave as
were the deeds of Fingal, their fame was not so great as that of his son
Ossian, who struck a lofty harp as he recounted his father's glory. Could
the real poems be found, they would verify the lines:
From the barred visor of antiquity
Reflected shines the eternal light of Truth
As from a mirror.
And if they could not be found, they might be counterfeited. This was
undertaken by Doctor James Macpherson. Catering to the spirit of the age,
he reproduced the songs of Ossian and the lofty deeds of Fingal.
Again, we have referred, in an early part of this work, to the almost
barren expanse in the highway of English literature from the death of
Chaucer to the middle of the sixteenth century; this barrenness was due,
as we saw, to the turbulence of those years--civil war, misgovernment, a
time of bloody action rather than peaceful authorship.
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