English Literature For Boys and Girls | Page 8

a man and wrote poetry, it was full of the sounds of battle, full, too,
of love for mountain and glen and their rolling mists.
The Macphersons were poor, but they saw that their son was clever, and they determined
that he should be well taught. So when he left school they sent him to college, first to
Aberdeen and then to Edinburgh.
Before he was twenty James had left college and become master of the school in his own
native village. He did not, however, like that very much, and soon gave it up to become
tutor in a family.
By this time James Macpherson had begun to write poetry. He had also gathered together
some pieces of old Gaelic poetry which he had found among the Highland folk. These he
showed to some other poets and writers whom he met, and they thought them so beautiful
that he published them in a book.
The book was a great success. All who read it were delighted with the poems, and said
that if there was any more such poetry in the Highlands, it should be gathered together
and printed before it was lost and forgotten for ever. For since the '45 the English had
done everything to make the Highlanders forget their old language and customs. They
were forbidden to wear the kilt or the tartan, and everything was done to make them
speak English and forget Gaelic.
So now people begged Macpherson to travel through the Highlands and gather together
as much of the old poetry of the people as he could. Macpherson was at first unwilling to
go. For one thing, he quite frankly owned that he was not a good Gaelic scholar. But at
length he consented and set out.
For four months Macpherson wandered about the Highlands and Islands of Scotland,
listening to the tales of the people and writing them down. Sometimes, too, he came
across old manuscripts with ancient tales in them. When he had gathered all he could, he
returned to Edinburgh and set to work to translate the stories into English.
When this new book of Gaelic poetry came out, it again was a great success. It was
greeted with delight by the greatest poets of France, Germany, and Italy, and was soon
translated into many languages. Macpherson was no longer a poor Highland laddie, but a
man of world-wide fame. Yet it was not because of his own poetry that he was famous,
but because he had found (so he said) some poems of a man who lived fifteen hundred
years before, and translated them into English. And although Macpherson's book is called
The Poems of Ossian, it is written in prose. But it is a prose which is often far more
beautiful and poetical than much that is called poetry.
Although at first Macpherson's book was received with great delight, soon people began
to doubt about it. The Irish first of all were jealous, for they said that Ossian was an Irish
poet, that the heroes of the poems were Irish, and that Macpherson was stealing their
national heroes from them.
Then in England people began to say that there never had been an Ossian at all, and that
Macpherson had invented both the poems and all the people that they were about. For the
English knew little of the Highlanders and their customs. Even after the '15 and the '45
people in the south knew little about the north and those who lived there. They thought of

it as a land of wild mountains and glens, a land of mists and cloud, a land where wild
chieftains ruled over still wilder clans, who, in their lonely valleys and sea-girt islands,
were for ever warring against each other. How could such a people, they asked, a people
of savages, make beautiful poetry?
Dr. Samuel Johnson, a great writer of whom we shall hear more later, was the man of his
day whose opinion about books was most thought of. He hated Scotland and the Scottish
folk, and did not believe that any good thing could come from them. He read the poems
and said that they were rubbish, such as any child could write, and that Macpherson had
made them all up.
So a quarrel, which has become famous, began between the two men. And as Dr. Johnson
was far better known than Macpherson, most people agreed with him and believed that
Macpherson had told a "literary lie," and that he had made up all the stories.
There is no harm in making up stories. Nearly every one who writes does that. But it is
wrong to make up stories and then pretend that they were written by some one else more
famous than yourself.
Dr. Johnson and Macpherson were