  Now we come to one who, with all his faults, was not only a real, but a great poet. The events of his life need not detain us long. He was born at Kingussie, Inverness-shire, in 1738, and educated at Aberdeen. At twenty he published a very juvenile production in verse, called 'The Highlandman: a Heroic Poem, in six cantos.' He taught for some time the school of Ruthven, near his native place, and became afterwards tutor in the family of Graham of Balgowan. While attending a scion of this family—afterwards Lord Lynedoch—at Moffat Wells, Macpherson became acquainted with Home, the author of 'Douglas,' and shewed to him some fragments of Gaelic poetry, translated by himself. Home was delighted with these specimens, and the consequence was, that our poet, under the patronage of Home, Blair, Adam Fergusson, and Dr Carlyle, (the once famous 'Jupiter Carlyle,' minister of Inveresk—called 'Jupiter' because he used to sit to sculptors for their statues of 'Father Jove,' and declared by Sir Walter Scott to have been the 'grandest demigod he ever saw,') published, in a small volume of sixty pages, his 'Fragments of Ancient Poetry, translated from the Gaelic or Erse language.' This brochure became popular, and Macpherson was provided with a purse to go to the Highlands to collect additional pieces. The result was, in 1762, 'Fingal: an Epic Poem;' and, in the next year, 'Temora,' another epic poem. Their sale was prodigious, and the effect not equalled till, twenty-four years later, the poems of Burns appeared. He realised £1200 by these productions. In 1764 he accompanied Governor Johnston to Pensacola as his secretary, but quarrelled with him, and returned to London. Here he became a professional pamphleteer, always taking the ministerial side, and diversifying these labours by publishing a translation of Homer, in the style of his Ossian, which, as Coleridge says of another production, was 'damned unanimously.' Our readers are familiar with his row with Dr Johnson, who, when threatened with personal chastisement for his obstinate and fierce incredulity in the matter of Ossian, thus wrote the author:— 'To Mr JAMES MACPHERSON. 'I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do the best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall not be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian. 'What would you have me to retract? I thought your book an imposture. I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public, which I dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable, and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard, not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will. 'SAM. JOHNSON.'Nothing daunted by this, and a hundred other similar rebuffs; Macpherson, like Mallett before him, but with twenty times his abilities, pursued his peculiar course. He was appointed agent for the Nabob of Arcot, and became M.P. for Carnelford. In this way he speedily accumulated a handsome fortune, and in 1789, while still a youngish man, he retired to his native parish, where he bought the estate of Raitts, and founded a splendid villa, called Belleville, where, in ease and affluence, he spent his remaining days. Surviving Johnson, his ablest opponent, by twelve years, he died on the 17th of February 1796, in the full view of Ossian's country. One of his daughters became his heir, and another was the first wife of Sir David Brewster. Macpherson in his will ordered that his body should be buried in Westminster Abbey, and left a sum of money to erect a monument to him near Belleville. He lies, accordingly, in Poets' Corner, and a marble obelisk to his memory may be seen near Kingussie, in the centre of some trees. There is nothing new that is true, or true that is new, to be said about the questions connected with Ossian's Poems. That Macpherson is the sole author is a theory now as generally abandoned as the other, which held that he was simply a free translator of the old bard. To the real fragments of Ossian, which he found in the Highlands, he acted very much as he did to the ancient property of Raitts, in his own native parish. 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. The former says, 'Macpherson was certainly a man of high talents, and his poetic powers are honourable to his country.' Wilson, in an admirable paper in Blackwood for November 1839, while admitting many faults in Ossian, eloquently proclaims the presence in his strains of much of the purest, most pathetic, and most sublime poetry, instancing the 'Address to the Sun' as equal to anything in Homer or Milton. Both these great writers have paid Macpherson a higher compliment still,—they have imitated him, and the speeches of Allan Macaulay (a far greater genius than his namesake), Ranald MacEagh, and Elspeth MacTavish, in the 'Waverley Novels,' and such, articles by Christopher North as 'Cottages,' 'Hints for the Holidays,' and a 'Glance at Selby's Ornithology,' are all coloured by familiarity and fellow-feeling with Ossian's style. Best of all, the Highlanders as a nation have accepted Ossian as their bard; he is as much the poet of Morven as Burns of Coila, and it is as hopeless to dislodge the one from the Highland as the other from the Lowland heart. The true way to learn to appreciate Ossian's poetry is not to hurry, as Macaulay seems to have done, in a steamer from Glasgow to Oban, and thence to Ballachulish, and thence through Glencoe, (mistaking a fine lake for a 'sullen pool' on his way, and ignoring altogether its peculiar features of grandeur,) and thence to Inverness or Edinburgh; but it is to live for years—as Macpherson did while writing Ossian, and Wilson also did to some extent—under the shadow of the mountains,—to wander through lonely moors amidst drenching mists and rains,—to hold trysts with thunder-storms on the summit of savage hills,—to bathe after nightfall in dreary tarns,—to lie over the ledge and dip one's fingers in the spray of cataracts,—to plough a solitary path into the heart of forests, and to sleep and dream for hours amidst their sunless glades,—to meet on twilight hills the apparition of the winter moon rising over snowy wastes,—to descend by her ghastly light precipices where the eagles are sleeping,—and, returning home, to be haunted by night-visions of mightier mountains, wilder desolations, and giddier descents;—experience somewhat like this is necessary to form a true 'Child of the Mist,' and to give the full capacity for sharing in or appreciating the shadowy, solitary, pensive, and magnificent spirit which tabernacles in Ossian's poetry. Never, at least, can we forget how, in our boyhood, while feeling, but quite unable to express, the emotions which were suggested by the bold shapes of mountains resting against the stars, mirrored from below in lakes and wild torrents, and quaking sometimes in concert with the quaking couch of the half-slumbering earthquake, the poems of Ossian served to give our thoughts an expression which they could not otherwise have found—how they at once strengthened and consolidated enthusiasm, and are now regarded with feelings which, wreathed around earliest memories and the strongest fibres of the heart, no criticism can ever weaken or destroy. OSSIAN'S ADDRESS TO THE SUN.I feel the sun, O Malvina!—leave me to my rest. Perhaps O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven, but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more; whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season; thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds careless of the voice of the morning. Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth! Age is dark and unlovely; it is like the glimmering light of the moon when it shines through broken clouds, and the mist is on the hills: the blast of the north is on the plain; the traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey. DESOLATION OF BALCLUTHA. |
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