u 4 LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE 



palmed off upon the credulity of the world by Mac- 

 pherson himself. 



Into this unhappy and still unsettled controversy 

 I have no intention of entering. For my present pur- 

 pose it is not necessary to decide whether the so-called 

 poems of Ossian were genuine ancient Celtic produc- 

 tions or were entirely fabricated after the middle of 

 last century, though I think we may safely steer a 

 middle course between the extreme views that have 

 been put forward on either side. Few persons now 

 believe that Macpherson's Epics ever existed as such 

 among the Highlanders. But, on the other hand, it 

 is generally admitted that he really did find a number 

 of Ossianic fragments and that he strung these together 

 no doubt with copious connecting material of his own. 

 How much was genuine and old, and how much 

 spurious and modern, has never yet been satisfactorily 

 determined. But in estimating the influence of Mac- 

 pherson's Ossian on literature, we have no need to 

 consider the age of the poems. None of these were 

 known to the world at large until 1760, and we have 

 therefore only to concern ourselves with their history 

 from that year onwards. 



Those who have engaged in the controversy have 

 almost wholly entered it from the literary or anti- 

 quarian side. I prefer to approach it from the side 

 of the scenery and topography of the West Highlands, 

 and to inquire how far the Ossianic landscape was a 

 true representation of nature, whether there was any- 

 thing in it new to our literature, and whether it exerted 

 any lasting effect on the attitude of society towards 

 the type of scenery which it depicted. 



