schemes of interest and ambition fulfilled, he seemed to reflect and grow domestic; and shewed, of late, a great inclination to be an indulgent landlord, and very liberal to the poor, of which I could relate various instances, more tender and interesting than flashy or ostentatious. His heart and temper were originally good: his religious principles were, I fear, unfixed and fluctuating ; but the primary cause that so much genius, taste, benevolence, and prosperity, did not produce or diffuse more happiness, was his living a stranger to the comforts of domestic life, from which unhappy connexions excluded him.”

By his will, dated in June, 1793, after distributing among his relatives and friends property to a large amount, he bequeathed £1000 to Mr. John Mackenzie, of Fig-tree-court in the Temple, to defray the expense of printing and publishing Ossian in the original; directed £300 to be laid out in erecting a monument to his memory, in some conspicuous situation at Belville; and ordered that his body should be carried from Scotland, and interred in Westminster Abbey. His remains were, accordingly, brought from the place where he died, and interred in Poet's

corner.

Immediately after Macpherson's decease, the Highland Society of Scotland, with the view of bringing to a termination, if possible, the still undecided controversy, as to the authenticity of the poems ascribed by him to Ossian, appointed a Committee of their number, to institute a regular inquiry into the subject.

In the time of nominating this committee, the society were peculiarly fortunate. Dr. Blair, Professor

Ferguson, Dr. Carlyle, and Mr. John Home, the principal advisers and promoters of the original publication of Macpherson, and many other gentlemen of respectability who had been intimately acquainted with Macpherson, and had either assisted him in his researches, or witnessed the prosecution of his undertaking, were then living; and the immediate descendant of the last of the Caledonian bards remained to give his testimony as to the manner in which Macpherson had become possessed of an antient Gaelic manuscript, which was said to have supplied him with great part of his materials.

While the committee were proceeding with their labours, a powerful antagonist of the antiquity of the poems started up in the person of Mr. Malcolm Laing, who, at the end of his History of Scotland, published in 1800, gave an elaborate dissertation on their merits. He contended, that the works published by Macpherson contained several false and incorrect allusions to the History of Britain during its subjection to the Romans; that the manners of the Highlanders, as described in these poems, differ exceedingly from those which are represented by historians who treat of the same period, and in particular, that the manners depicted in Ossian are much more refined than those which appeared in the Highlands at a period considerably later; that these compositions betray many palpable imitations of the Greek and Roman classics, of the Scriptures, and of other writings, and, therefore, could not have been produced by Ossian, who must have been unacquainted with these sources; that all the traditionary poems hitherto discovered in the Highlands refer to the middle ages,

comprehending the ninth and tenth centuries; that no Gaelic manuscript, as yet found, is older than the fifteenth century; that the poems ascribed to Ossian nearly resemble, in their style and modes of expression, the Highlander, formerly published by Macpherson as his own composition, and that it is more than probable, that the Erse manuscripts produced by Macpherson were translations of his own pieces from the English, &c.

The objections of Mr. Laing met with two zealous respondents in Mr. Archibald M'Donald of Liverpool and the Rev. Dr. Graham of Aberfoyle, the former of whom published "some of Ossian's lesser poems rendered into verse, with a Preliminary Discourse, in answer to Mr. Laing's Critical and Historical Dissertation on the Antiquity of Ossian's Poems ;" and the latter "An Essay on the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, in which the objections of Malcolm Laing, Esq. are particularly considered and refuted; to which is added, An Essay on the Mythology of Ossian's Poems, by Professor Richardson of Glasgow College."

The public judgement, however, still remained suspended until, in 1810, the Report of the Committee of the Highland Society made its appearance. It was drawn up by Mr. Mackenzie, the chairman of the committee, and was well calculated to reconcile even the most opposing opinions on the subject. After detailing the course of inquiry which the committee had pursued, and referring to a copious appendix of documents, they thus state what they conceive and what posterity will probably agree with them in considering to have been the real state of the case.

"The committee can, with confidence, state its opinion that such poetry did exist; that it was common, general, and in great abundance; that it was of a most impressive and striking sort; in a high degree eloquent, tender, and sublime. The committee is possesssed of no documents to shew how much of his collection Mr. M. obtained in the form of what he has given to the world. The poems and fragments which the committee has been able to preserve, contain often the substance, and sometimes almost the literal expression, the ipsissima verba, of passages given by Mr. Macpherson in the poems of which he has published translations, but the committee has not been able to obtain any one poem, the same in title and tenor with the poems published by him. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to supply chasms, and to give connection by inserting passages which he did not find, and to add what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the original composition, by striking out passages, by softening incidents, by refining the language; in short, by changing what he considered as too simple or too rude for a modern ear, and elevating what in his opinion was below the standard of good poetry. To what degree, however, he exercised those liberties, it is impossible for the committee to determine. The advantages he possessed, which the committee began its inquiries too late to enjoy, of collating from the oral recitation of a number of persons, now no more, a very great number of the same poems on the same subjects, and collating those different copies or editions, if they may be so called, rejecting what was spurious or corrupted in one copy, and adopting from another, something more genuine

and excellent in its place, afforded him an opportunity of putting together what might fairly enough be called an original whole; of much more beauty and with much fewer blemishes than the committee believes it now possible for any person or combination of persons to obtain."

It will be observed, that the committee say, that they have "not been able to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the poems published;" and this, notwithstanding the originals left by Mr. Macpherson for publication. The fact is, that the latter had no character of authenticity, and that they fully justified the suspicion so long entertained by the public, that Mr. Macpherson was all but the sole author of the poems which he ascribed to Ossian. Agreeably to the will of Mr. Macpherson, these pretended originals were published in a very splendid form, accompanied by two dissertations, one by Sir John Sinclair, and the other by Dr. Macarthur, besides a translation by the latter of an Italian dissertation on the Ossianic Controversy, written by the Abbé Cesarotti, who had translated the poems of Ossian into Italian; but both Editors appear to have fallen into a mistake as to the object which was to be served by the publication. They have laboured hard to keep up the old fiction that Macpherson was a mere translator; whereas Macpherson's own design in directing this publication, was doubtless to put an end to this fiction; and to inform posterity to whom their gratitude is truly due for the poems of Ossian.

Macpherson's character, it is true, loses something in point of moral rectitude and sincerity by this re