152 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
in manuscripts, difficulties will occur arising from obsolete words, 
errors in transcription, confused connection, and other causes. In 
such cases it is a common practice with translators to skip the diffi- 
culty, gloss over the matter with some decent commonplace, and 
sometime to make positive blunders, which is not difficult for a 
philologer to expose. All these signs of a translator’s hand are 
frequent in Macpherson’s English, and would be more so bad he 
not indulged in such a habit of skipping generally that it is difficult 
to say in certain cases decidedly that the skip was made because 
the writer of the English wished to shirk a difficulty. (3) It is a 
common practice with translators, when they find a passage a little 
obscure, to remove the obscurity by some manifest alteration of 
the phrase, or even by interpolating a line, or interlarding a com- 
mentary. This also occurs in Macpherson. (4) It is not always 
that a translator writes under the same vivid vision, or the same 
fervid inspiration as the original poet; and the consequence is that 
he will occasionally degrade poetry into prose, and specially fail to 
bring out that individuality of character in his word-painting which 
Ruskin has so triumphantly insisted on in the case of the sister 
art. The instances of failure to seize the most striking features of 
the original, and the substitution of generic for specific epithets, 
are frequent in Macpherson. (5) Most translators y ie — some- 
times, no doubt, wisely — to the temptation of improving on their 
originals; and Macpherson, from what we know of him, was the 
last man in the world to think of resisting such a temptation. 
How much of the G-aelic, as we now have it — that is, his clean 
copy of his own originals — was subjected to this process of beauti- 
fication, as we may call it, no one can now tell, but 1 have traced 
in several instances departures from the simplicity of the original 
Gaelic, which can be explained most naturally on the supposition 
that they proceed from a translator who has yielded, without any 
just cause, to this flattering seduction. When the results obtained 
by the detailed application of these tests are combined with the 
amount of external evidence to be found in the Highland Society’s 
report to the effect that Macpherson actually did translate from 
Gaelic originals, and was seen by various parties for weeks and 
months employed in the work of traslation, a cumulative proof was 
produced that he was most anxious to see by what arguments Mr 
