



Mil. James Macpherson, 



I have received your foolish and impudent letter. 

 Any violence that shall be attempted upon me, I will do my best to 

 repel ; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me ; 

 for I will not be hindered from exposing what I think a cheat, by the 

 menaces of a ruffian. What would you have me retract ? I thought 

 your work an injposture ; I think so still ; and for my opinion, I have 

 given reasons which I here dare you to refute. Your abilities, since 

 your Homer, are not so formidable ; and what I hear of your mora- 

 lity, inclines me to credit rather what you shall prove, than what 

 you shall say. 



S. JOHNSOX. 



Finding that the redoubtable critic was no more to be intimi- 

 dated than Cuchullin of spears, or the car-borne king of woody 

 Morven, Macpherson became convinced that his Ossianic mode of 

 deciding the controversy would be attended by no success. Casting 

 off the buskin, and descending from his Iambics, he caused the fol- 

 lowing advertisement, in the name of his bookseller, to be edited in 

 some of the public journals: "that during six weeks after the first' 

 publication of the poems, the original manuscript lay at his shop, for 

 the inspection of the curious." 



(Signed) "T. Becket." 



Shaw affirms that this MS. was never seen ; that he had no MS. 

 to deposit with Becket, unless some Irish one, in which, had an Irish 

 gentleman gone to inspect it, he might have found the genealogy of 

 his own family. For, he adds, "it is well known that the Earse dialect 

 of the Gaelic was never' written nor printed until Mr. Mac-Farlane, 



VOL. XVI. C 



