This he purchased in its crude state, and beautified into a mountain
paradise. He changed, however, its name into Belleville, and it had been
better if he had behaved in a similar way with the poems, and published
them as, with some little groundwork from another, the veritable writings
of James Macpherson, Esq. The ablest opponent of his living reputation
was, as we said, Johnson; and the ablest enemy of his posthumous fame has
been Macaulay. We are at a loss to understand _his_ animosity to the
author of Ossian. Were the Macphersons and Macaulays ever at feud, and
did the historian lose his great-great-grandmother in some onslaught made
on the Hebrides by the progenitors of the pseudo-Ossian? Macpherson as
a man we respect not, and we are persuaded that the greater part of
Ossian's Poems can be traced no further than his teeming brain. Nor are
we careful to defend his poetry from the common charges of monotony,
affectation, and fustian. But we deem Macaulay grossly unjust in his
treatment of Macpherson's genius and its results, and can fortify our
judgment by that of Sir Walter Scott and Professor Wilson, two men as far
superior to the historian in knowledge of the Highlands and of Highland
song, and in genuine poetic taste, as they were confessedly in original
imagination.
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