Here, too, was a
great temptation for some gifted but oblique mind to supply a partial
literature for that bare period; a literature which, entirely fabricated,
should yet bear all the characteristics of the history, language, customs,
manners, and religion of that time.
This attempt was made by Thomas Chatterton, an obscure, ill-educated lad,
without means or friends, but who had a master-mind, and would have
accomplished some great feat in letters, had he not died, while still very
young, by his own hand.
Let us examine these frauds in succession: we shall find them of double
historic value, as literary efforts in one age designed to represent the
literature of a former age.
JAMES MACPHERSON.--James Macpherson was born at Ruthven, a village in
Inverness-shire, in 1738. Being intended for the ministry, he received a
good preliminary education, and became early interested in the ancient
Gaelic ballads and poetic fragments still floating about the Highlands of
Scotland. By the aid of Mr. John Home, the author of _Douglas_, and his
friends Blair and Ferguson, he published, in 1760, a small volume of sixty
pages entitled, _Fragments of Ancient Poetry translated from the Gaelic or
Erse Language_.
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