56 



SECTION III. 



On the Imitations in MacpJierson's Ossian. 



In no place is Macpherson's Ossian more vulnerable than in his 

 Imitations. These meet us in every page ; they are visible to the 

 most inexperienced eye, and assailable by the shafts of every young 

 recruit of criticism. The defenders of Ossian are sensible of their 

 weakness in this point, and accordingly exercise all their ingenuity tp 

 repel the attacks of their assailants. But in vain. Mr. Laing is an 

 antagonist, whose keen and well tempered weapons they can neither 

 blunt nor turn aside. 



Macpherson has exercised considerable skill in some of his imita- 

 tions, and employed much art to disguise them ; but to hide was 

 impossible. The prosaic form, which, for wise reasons, he preferred 

 to rhyme, or legitimate blank verse, rendered them less liable to 

 recognition. Even Gray, suspecting no fraud, did not at first disco- 

 ver that some of his own poetry had been transferred to the pages of 

 Ossianic fiction. But Mr. Laing, though in his younger days he dream- 

 ed of nothing less than imposition, having his doubts once excited, 

 entered on the inquiry, and pursued it with diligence and success, till 

 it terminated in the clearest and strongest conviction. In the essay 

 annexed to his History of Scotland, and in his edition of Macpher- 

 son's Ossian, he has shewn that many of the choicest flowers of the 

 pretended Caledonian bard, notwithstanding their new arrangement 

 and connexion, were the original property of the poets of Greece, 

 and the prophets of Judea. 



