He
wriggled on the hook, and more than once timidly hinted that the poems
owed not a little to the poetic genius of the translator. But this half-
hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a part of his fame stirred the
Caledonian enthusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last, when he was
no longer able to restrain his supporters, the wretched Macpherson found
no escape but one. In middle age, some twenty years after his first
appearance on the poetic horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and an
imperfect knowledge of the Gaelic tongue, to forge the originals. In
1807, eleven years after his death, these were at last published. The
progress of genuine Celtic scholarship during the succeeding century did
the rest; and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and vapors which were
the inspiration of his Muse. {78} The poems of Ossian are only one,
though perhaps the most signal, instance of the forgeries which prevailed
like an epidemic at the time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these,
like Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, were little better than
cold-blooded mercenary frauds. Others, like Chatterton's Rowley Poems
and Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, are full of the zest and
delight of play-acting. Even Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_, though it is
free from the reproach of forgery, is touched by the same spirit. The
severe morality of scholarship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or
modern matter.


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