The absurd pride and consequence of Macpherson, scorning, as he pretended, to satisfy any body that doubted his veracity, tended much to confirm the general scepticism: and, added Hume, “if the poems are of genuine origin, they are in all respects the greatest curiosities that were ever discovered in the history of literature.”
The first regular attack on the authenticity of Ossian’s poems was made in 1781, by Mr. Shaw, the author of a Gaelic Dictionary and Grammar; and it was a vigorous one. He contended, from internal evidence, that the poems were forgeries; he asserted that many of the Highland persons who had vouched for their genuineness had never seen a line of the supposed originals, and that Macpherson himself had constantly evaded showing them to him; and he maintained, that both the fable and the machinery of the principal poems were Irish; and that if, as a blind, any manuscripts had ever been shown, they must have been in the Irish language, the Earse dialect of the Gaelic never having been written or printed till, in 1754, Mr. Macfarlane printed a translation of Baxter’s “Call to the Unconverted.” An answer was attempted by Mr. Clarke, a member of the Scottish Antiquarian Society; but, though he succeeded in some points, he failed in his principal object.
After a lapse of nearly twenty years, a more powerful antagonist of Ossian took the field. This was Mr. Malcolm Laing, author of a History of Scotland. To that history he added an elaborate dissertation, in which he skilfully investigated the claim of the poems to antiquity. The principal grounds on which he decided against it were, the many false and inaccurate allusions to the history of Britain while the country was under the dominion of the Romans; the flagrant difference between Highland manners as described in the poems and by historians; the many palpable imitations from the classics and the Scriptures; the fact that all the Highland traditionary poems yet known referred to the ninth and tenth centuries, and that there existed no Gaelic manuscript older than the fifteenth century; the resemblance which the strains of the pretended Ossian bore to The Highlander, one of Macpherson’s acknowledged compositions; and, lastly, certain startling expressions used in print by Macpherson, which seemed almost to render it certain that he was not the translator, but the author, of the works which he had given to the world under the name of Ossian.