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Laying the Machinery of Detection Bare: James Macpherson, Ossian, and the Ballad Revival
🕑 Added 2025-08-17 18:20:44 +0000 UTCThomas Percy
Thomas Percy was the son of a grocery, born in Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, in 1729. He prospered at the free school, and won a scholarship to attend Oxford, where he took his masters, and studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and prepared himself for a career as a clergyman. His father was not unlike Shakespeare's. He was a successful enough businessman to rise to civic prominence, and served as town's bailiff. Later in life, however, he suffered from financial setbacks and mismanagement. The family name was originally spelled "Piercy," and Percy dropped the 'i' from his spelling of the surname and adopted the more prestigious form of "Percy," to highlight his distant family connection with the Count and Countess of Northumberland. These Percy's are the subjects and actors of several of the ballads Thomas would later publish in his famous Reliques.
Percy took his professional duties as preacher seriously, and composed many sermons throughout his career, often along the lines of templates and formulas he developed to aid him in discharging his office. Early in his career he struck a very useful friendship up with the Earl of Sussex, who was only a few years his senior. Through this relationship he was awarded the position of Rector at Wilby in 1756. Percy was very skilled at ingratiating himself with the nobility, but unfortunately for him, his powerful new friend, George Augustus Yelverton, 2nd Earl of Sussex died in 1758, at the age of only 31. The 3rd Earl of Sussex, August's younger brother, reappointed Percy to the position of Chaplain to the family, but personally, they were never on the same terms that Percy came to enjoy with the 2nd Earl. While August lived, Percy enjoyed the Earl's hospitality at Pall Mall, in London, when the House of Lords was in session. The following excerpt may serve to illustrate the busy course of sightseeing and pleasure that were characteristic of his frequent stays in the city:
>"He visited Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, the House of Commons, and the recently built Westminster Bridge. He frequented the coffee houses, and proved to be an insatiable playgoer. On Tuesday, November 27, he took Mrs. Perrins to Drury Lane to see David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard in Farquhar's Beaux' Stratagem, and he returned the next night to see them in King Richard III. On Thursday he found time only for the afterpiece at Covent Garden, Lewis Theobald's Harlequin Sorcerer. But he was again at Drury Lane on Friday with a young Worchestershire and Oxford Friend, George Durrant, to see Samuel Foote and Mrs. Pritchard in Congreve's The Old Bachelor and Foote in his own afterpiece, The Englishman in Paris. On Saturday he and Tom Woodington attended the opening performance at Drury Lane of Richard Glover's Boadicia, in which he noted that the players "acted in fear" of the audience throughout the first act, and even Mrs. Pritchard was a "little hiss'd."
Percy was an amiable and lively companion, noted by many friends especially for his store of anecdotes. He enjoyed shooting, and on three separate occasions he shot himself when a gun he was carrying, or had tucked into his belt, accidently discharged. On another occasion, while walking with his future wife Anne, in 1758, they "came upon an enclosure in which a bull was bellowing and tearing up the ground with its horns." The bull charged the couple, and while Anne ran, Percy recalled having read somewhere that "all Animals are affraid of the Voice of Man." Brandishing his walking stick he shouted and charged the bull, which apparently succeeded in scaring it off and saving their lives. Percy married Anne the following year, and the two enjoyed a happy marriage and had three daughters.
As a provincial priest of a small town, Percy enjoyed a rustic, secluded and pleasant life with his family in their cottage. But during his regular trips to London he positioned himself socially with the literary elite of his day. In the summer of 1756, Percy's friend James Grainger introduced him to Samuel Johnson, and he quickly became a favorite of Johnson's during the years immediately following the critic's publication of his dictionary. Percy struck up friendship with Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Farmer, Thomas Warton, David Garrick, Charlotte Lennox, and the blind Mrs. Williams, whom Dr. Johnson lived with for many years. It was Johnson, according to Percy, who first suggested the project of printing the manuscript of ballads Percy had acquired.
From Easton Maudit, Percy also would visit the poet William Shenstone, in Stropshire, at his estate, The Leasowes. Shenstone was a fashionable, but indolent poet, who collected many (somewhat) lesser, but still worthy compositions of the members of his circle into a compilation known as Shenstone's Miscellany, and this included some of Percy's own efforts at imitation ballads. Shenstone's primary legacy though has been in landscape gardening, through the design of the Leasowes, which is considered exemplary of early English gardens. Shenstone and Johnson would be the two biggest influences on Percy's conception and development of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
In 1760 Percy's visits to London became especially productive. He began his literary career with translations of Ovid for an edition being prepared by James Grainger. But with his growing popularity among Johnson's circle, and his introduction to important publishers like the brothers James and Robert Dodsley, he was very soon able to sell his own proposals for publication projects. The first of these was a translation of the 17th century Chinese novel, Haoqiu zhuan, which was merely an English translation another party had made, that Percy edited and supplied with notes on Chinese society and culture. Over the course of the 1760s, through 1770, Percy published ten books, not all of them particularly noteworthy or successful. The most important of these, and the one Percy's reputation is built on, was his Reliques from 1765.
Of the 176 ballads Percy published in his collection, only 40 or so are taken from his manuscript folio. The rest were assembled from older printed collections, or taken from Pepys collection at Cambridge, or the Sloane manuscripts at the British Museum Library. There is no set definition of what a ballad is. One definition stressed that ballads were sub-literary poetic productions that "could not sing for themselves," but relied on a musical melody. Some defined ballads simply in terms of age, as a class of poems that had been transformed by time into ballads. Others emphasized the popular dimension of the ballads as their defining feature. At this time ballads had an even politically charged, populist energy to them, with crowds of rioters singing them during lynchings of criminals. There were broadside, printed ballads that had proliferated during the later 16th century. But there were also oral ballads which have been cast as an older, and somewhat independent tradition. The point being that there was no one set concept or ideal of what a ballad was. There was no canon of popular ballads, and when Percy set about assembling his collection, he was faced with a difficult task of establishing criterion for inclusion that encompassed a coherent definition and "vision" of what a ballad was. He set himself to curating the best examples of a genre of poetry that existed largely in his imagination and not as a clearcut historical fact. The ballad was unstable and not altogether very prestigious.
Genres of antiquarian scholarship and forms of popular historical writing were, at this time in literary history, in tension. Antiquarian writing was overburdened by notes and pedantry, and rhetorically, as a mode of literary communication, antiquarian scholarship.
Percy, in order to present the ballads to a tasteful audience, made many alterations. In some cases he updated and normalized the orthography. In other cases there was a lacuna in the manuscript, or a word that was illegible, reasonably enough he had to sometimes supply his best guess. He also had to reconcile multiple versions and variations of the ballads, and he would construct an ideal version of them by combining what he considered the best features of different versions. In some cases though Percy would go much farther. In one case he expanded a ballad from a fragment of 30 lines to 400, writing the new additions himself. He altered the syntax of lines, changed the rhymes, and sometimes completely changed the meanings of lines. He would later be lambasted for this by the Shakespearean critic Joseph Ritson, and later by the editor FJ Furnivall.
Still though, the collection was very successful. Percy had the foresight to dedicate the book to the Countess of Northumberland, the modern holder of the Percy name. As he had done with the Earl of Sussex, he quickly ingratiated himself with the Earl and Countess of Northumberland, and was appointed to be tutor to their 17 year old son. The two of them rode from 300 miles from the English border to Edinburgh, where Percy questioned Adam Ferguson about Ossian. On this occasion Ferguson produced his favorite student, James Macpherson's cousin, John Macpherson, to recite some Gaelic fragments and further the hoax, as Percy was told by his hosts the lines corresponded exactly to what James had published.
Percy's Reliques had come out in 1765, and were directly inspired by the model James Macpherson had provided. Percy's editorial approach to sharpening and polishing lines was justified somewhat in Shenstone and Percy's minds by the example of Macpherson. Besides the Reliques Percy also brought his own collection of pseudo-Ossianic Runic poetry from Icelandic sources. And overall the entire ballad collecting project took great impetus from Macpherson.
Ballad collection, Homer, Bards, Druids
The best place to begin is with more of a discussion of oral poetry and its transmission generally. In 1765 the Bishop Thomas Percy published his collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The story goes that he saw some servants using a manuscript one day to start a fire, and having rescued it from being consigned to the flames, discovered it was a common place book collection of ballads. He polished these, and edited them, and initiated a what is sometimes called a great ballad revival. In his scholarly apparatus he delved into the reconstruction of the historical institution of the minstrel. Ballads were a type of ephemeral poetry, which were not always preserved, and their transmission was mainly oral. Percy speculated, following the example of the ancient bards and the French troubadours, that there was a comparable, legally recognized institution in Medieval England: the minstrel.
Oral poetry will be a theme in this episode. The law in England is the customary law, or the common law. The ancient customary law is the constitution of England. In Whig historicism the question of the ancient constitution is paramount. The first historical sources we have about the manner in which the Ancient Britons lived and governed themselves comes from the descriptions of Ancient Roman and Greek geographers and writings by Caesar, which depict the conquest of the Gaulic people. The laws of the that ancient people in England was a politically important matter, as it was speculated that the Parliament had its origins in a council of tribal chiefs which may have governed England before the Romans. Or did England always exist under a King? From the time of Camden on, a more historically sound and textually grounded approach had developed regarding Druidic culture. Stone Henge was, in the 17th century, the main archeological evidence for Druidic culture, as John Aubrey was the first to understand. The ancient Druidic and Bardic past was sealed off, as there were no written records, and archeology at that time was so much in its infancy.
Oral poetry could reconnect us to aspects of that time though, as a bridge. The study of the customs and manners of people at previous historical periods in England became more of a concern in the 17th and 18th century, as historians recognized the historical mutability of these things. An image of the customs of the past, going back who knows how far, could be formed with recourse to a theory of oral poetic transmission. Historical events, names, places, and even attitudes and beliefs of the past were passed from generation to generation in a theoretically unchanging way. The ballads and songs existed in a more popular substratum of literature across the eras, and so their transmission was uncorrupted, and could even go on in parallel to the development of written poetic genres that were developing. Sometimes, perhaps long after a ballad was first written, a collector may have transcribed it, so even though our first written record of ballad may only be from the late medieval period, say 1500, it may have been composed a long time before, making the historical information it can offer all that more ancient.
The minstrel of Percy though is a historical construct. As is the older office of the bard. Our knowledge of who these poets were, how they were trained, how fidelity of the ballads was maintained over time, these are all matters of historical speculation. The transmission of ballads is a complex matter, that differs in a case by case way. But the invention of the bard, as a carrier of historical knowledge through an unbroken tradition of oral poetry, came, during the 18th century, to be widely appreciated as a common stage in the historical development of different nations. This opened up the field for comparative study of ballad poetry between different countries and historical periods.
Homer was maybe the original case study, and in the later 18th century, scholarly perception of Homer shifted away from his character as a specific historical figure, towards the study of Greek epic poetry as an oral ballad tradition that evolved continuously over the course of centuries. The landmark work in this field was F.A. Wolf's 1795 Prolegomena to Homer. Wolf himself employs a comparative approach and draws on Macpherson's Ossian to illuminate the history of Homeric poetry, assuming that the two bards are both representatives of a common stage of human civilization that all cultures develop through.
Wolf points out, at some length, how in the Iliad no direct references to writing can be found. The Greek alphabet itself at that early time was not suited to writing, and consisted of only 13 characters, rather than 26. Writing on animal skins was not common, at least before 700 BC. Only in one or two instances is something like writing arguably referenced, as in the drawing of lots, where some kind of symbol is used to mark the lots.
It was only under the rule of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus (600-528 BC) that the poems that make up the Iliad were written down into a definite order. It is said the Solon of Athens (640-561 BC), the famous law maker, was the first one to have the poems of the Iliad sung in a standard order. The Alexandrian grammarians tell us that a written form of the Iliad, in a definite order existed before Pisistratus, but that it was destroyed by a fire, flood, or earthquake, and so the order was lost. Pisistratus then recovered this order, and had a new edition of the Iliad compiled. He offered a reward to anyone who could contribute fragments from memory, and was very generous, so as to lead some people even to invent new lines so as to get the reward. But this did not trouble Pisistratus, who took all the fragments collected from dictation, and gave a copy each to 75 editors. These editors each undertook their own recension, and when they were done, the 75 versions of the text they produced were compared, and a definite edition was settled on by consensus. According to other historians, like Josephus, this did not happen, and most other sources agree that it was Pisistratus who first caused the Iliad to be written down, and that he did not therefore recover the text of an earlier, destroyed manuscript.
Zenodotus of Ephesus became the first director of the Library of Alexandria, in 284 BC, and with him a new, third epoch in the textual history of the Iliad began. Some 300 years after Pisistratus. The grammarians of the Library of Alexandria produced the form of the Iliad as we now know it. The vulgate form of the text is likely from the edition of Aristarchus of Samothrace, who became director of the Library in 153 BC. Wolf's Prolegomena was based on the rediscovery of Ventus A, which was published for the first time in 1788. Ventus A is a scholarly, critical edition of the Iliad which included the scholia, and notes and emendations of the Alexandrians, including Zenodotus and Aristarchus, among 250 others.
Eight named editions are known to have been used by the Alexandrian editors, so from the period between Pisistratus and Zenodotus, there were eight manuscript versions of the text which the Alexandrians used for their recension. One of these was by Aristotle with emendations by Alexander the Great (?).
Before Pisistratus, the poems had been developed freely by a class of rhapsodes, the successors of the bard. There were competitions where the rhapsodes' memories were pitted against one another, but as much as memory was prized for the faithful transmission of the text, these poets also would have polished and added whenever they felt they had an improvement to make to the text. No one rhapsode however would have preformed the whole Iliad in its canonical order. Rather the poems had no order, and the component books would have been preformed individually. When Pisistratus had the Iliad written down, he likely had the help of his younger son, and his brother, his succesor in the tyranny. "It is expressly reported that Orpheus of Croton, the author of an Argonautica, Onomacritus of Athens, Simonides of Ceos, and Anacreon of Teos lived in the closest friendship with Pisistratus". So these men, Wolf contends, may well have likewise had a hand in the making of the text. During their compilation of the Iliad they likely added in addition material, of their own making, to help fuse the pieces together.
The purpose of the above discussion is to provide some context for the discussion of Ossian. Macpherson presented Fingal (1762) as a complete, and continuous epic. He claimed to have recovered the proper order of the fragmentary, oral ballads. But whether he was a forger or not somewhat depends on how you interpret his claim. An Ossianic tradition of poetry does exist, in both Ireland and Scotland, dating back to 1200 AD, but not in a singular, epic form or consistent and ordered canon. If you take Macpherson's claim specifically to be that a 1-1 Gaelic manuscript version of the complete text of the epic Fingal, as Macpherson presented it, existed, then yes, Ossian is a forgery. But as we see with Homer, the same may be said about the Iliad, as no such epic existed prior to Pisistratus. Writing was just beginning to be used by the Greeks to record their laws, at the time of Solon, so the case is somewhat different. The Iliad seems to have been compiled into a single text as part of an Athenian civil project related to the constitution of the legal state. Macpherson's forgery was more of a secret deceit, but in some ways he did play a similar role to the editors of Pisistratus in the closure of an Ossianic canon into a definitive, synthetic epic.
Ossian
The Fian were "often men expelled from their clan, or landless men, sons of kings who quarrelled with their fathers, men proscribed, or men who seized this means to avenge some private wrong by taking the law into their own hands". A Fian is a warrior band. Fionn Mac Cumhaill is the leader of the Fian. This is the origin and subject matter of the Ossianic epic Fingal. Fingal is the chief of a band of warriors. His son his Ossian, and Ossian's son in Osgar. Three generations of warriors. In the poem the King of Lochlann (Scandenavia) invades Ireland, and the Irish king calls upon Fingal and his warriors to come over from Scotland to his aid, to save him. This story is one of three parts of Irish Gaelic poetry. The first part concerned mythology, and the gods. The second part is the Ulster cycle, of the Craobhruadh. Which takes place during the Roman invasion. This cycle was older than the Fian saga, and was more prestigious, and in a more archaic register. The Fian saga became, over time the dominant popular ballad subject, supplanting the Ulster cycle, so they show more development and more assimilation of later material.
The Fian were a corporate body, with a recognized function in pagan Gaelic society. They lived on tribute received in exchange for protection from invaders. They lived under strict military codes of honor and special training. The Fian cycle then provides some historical insight into a real historical-legal institution.
The earliest manuscript recording of the Scottish ballads is the book of the Dean of Lismore, from 1512-1560. Which was acquired by Macpherson in 1759. This is the oldest and best collection, of both the Ulster cycle and Fian cycle, but the book is written in a very strange phonetic orthography that has made it very challenging to interpret. Between 1400-1600 is considered the golden age of this Gaelic poetry. It was likely around 1200 that the Irish prose sagas were given a poetic form, and that the Gaelic ballad tradition begins. The Scottish highlanders are Irish in origin, and Scottish Gaelic is derived from Irish Gaelic, so the Ossianic literature is common to both nations, and developed a unique character distinct to each location. The Scottish lowlanders are descended from a gothic race known as the Picts. Between 1400-1600, the spoken and chanted ballads were set to harp music under French influence. The Dean of Lismore's book, which the Dean assembled working with his brother, captures the form that the ballads assumed during the 1400s, when they assumed their classical form and became associated with music. An important collection was made in the 17th century, but the majority of collections from oral recitation were done in the 18th century, and through comparison of these sources one can observe the continuing evolution of the poems themselves well into the 19th century, as a living oral poetic tradition.
With the ballad revival, that Macpherson himself helped stimulate, the time was ripe for a collection of the traditional Scottish ballads of the Fian cycle. Scholars no longer really see the poems as being either Irish or Scottish, but as being a shared heritage. Macpherson, however, was trying to reverse the Irish direction of transmission, by making the poems originally Scottish, and having them being imported into Ireland. The culture of the Fian and the literary dialect of Gaelic used in the poetry was common both to Ireland and the Highlands and remote places of Scotland ultimately.
The ballads, as they appear in the Dean of Lismore's book are often framed as conversations between Ossian and St. Patrick. Ossian is the last of his race, his son Osgar has been killed in battle. His father was Fingal, who was the greatest warrior, and who repelled various Danish or Scandinavian invaders in many great battles. Ossian is old, and strikes a tone of lament for the pagan culture that's in the the process of vanishing. And there is a juxtaposition, sometimes humorous, between his attitudes and the Christian temperament of St. Patrick. St. Patrick, for his part, plays something of the role of archivist or collector. He sends for Ossian because he loves his songs of the old, pre-Christian times; he has a historical curiosity in the older way of life that has replaced by Christianity. Their relationship, Ossian and St. Patricks, is friendly, but Ossian struggles to adapt to the new faith.
After the Dean of Lismore's book there Ardchonaill MS., dated 1690. The next is a collection of 10 poems made by the Rev. Alexander Pope in 1739. Several were next collected, and at least one published by Jerome Stone in 1755. Another collection was made by Archibald Fletcher of Achalader in Glenorchy, around 1750-1760, and Fletcher submitted these to the later Highland Commission inquiry into the Macpherson poetry. Around the same time Macpherson published his hoaxes he was in touch with two other contemporary collectors, the Rev. James Maclagan and the Rev. Donald MacNicol. Both of these men began making their own independent collections from recited oral sources during the 1750s. So you can see that Macpherson was not really isolated in what he was doing, but was part of a growing trend during the 1750s and 1760s, a growing fashion for ballads and ballad collecting.
The Ossianic poetry of Macpherson is obviously then, not a forgery out of whole cloth. There was indeed a living Scottish oral ballad tradition. Snatches of poems could still be heard and collected, but after 1745 the situation was changing, and English literary culture gave more an impetus to ballad preservation. Macpherson possessed the book of the Dean of Lismore, and corresponded with contemporary ballad collectors. He also made his own investigations and recorded some poems from oral recitation himself. When making Fingal, this was the material he had to draw on.
Macpherson
Born in 1736 at Ruthven, in the parish of Kinguisse, Inverness-Shire, in the valley of the river Spey. Macpherson's father was a poor farmer, related to the chief of the clan, Ewan Macpherson. In 1745 the chief had brought his clan to join the rebels. At the age of 10 Macpherson was witness to the retreat of the highland army. The laird of Strathmashie took Macpherson into his household, and Macpherson befriended the Laird's older son, who was a Gaelic poet. At 16 Macpherson was sent to Aberdeen University, studying Latin and Greek, under Thomas Blackwell, author of the Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer.
In 1756 Macpherson returned to Ruthven as a teacher at the charity school. He took no degree, and struggled to finish university due to tuition cost increases. In 1758 Macpherson published his first work, The Highlander, an epic poem based on a historical event, a Danish invasion of Scotland around the year 1000. In 1758 Macpherson also gave up his teaching post and relocated to Edinburgh, where he took up some writing and hackwork for the publisher Balfour. He worked during this time as a private tutor to Thomas Graham, the son of the laird of Balgowan. It was from this connection that Macpherson obtained the book of the Dean of Lismore.
In 1759, while traveling with his pupil. Macpherson made the acquaintance of Adam Ferguson. Later that year Ferguson introduced Macpherson to John Home, author of Douglas, at the spa town of Moffat, when Macpherson was 23. Macpherson interested Ferguson and Home with early Ossianic fragments, and Home showed these to Hugh Blair--professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at Edinburgh. The fragments attracted the general interest of Scottish intellectuals, David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson. And in 1760 Macpherson brought out his first Ossianic collection, the Fragments, in June 1760, with an introduction by Hugh Blair guaranteeing their authenticity.
Macpherson's imposture must be understood in this context. He was simply responding to the taste of this audience, and their desire for authentic historical Scottish literary poetry. John Home had tried to find success in London with his historical tragedy Douglas, but the play was rejected there. There was some effort among people like Home to advance Scottish literature, based on historical Scottish subjects, to a higher literary plane--but he was not completely successful at this, and Douglas met with mockery from some quarters, despite being something of a scandalous success in Home's native Scotland. In later years Adam Ferguson would run important cover for the authenticity of Ossian. Between Blair, and Ferguson and Macpherson it may be said there was a dimension of active collaboration.
The growing historical significance of the bard was happening against a background of philosophical enlightenment histography, as historians turned their attention to the comparative, stadial development of different societies. The bard was a common window into a primitive stage of social organization that all civilizations went through. So the histories of Hume and Ferguson were a contributing factor to Macpherson's conception of history generally that allowed him to perceive the unity of the ballads. On the other hand Hugh Blair, through his theories of rhetoric and aesthetics, brought into Macpherson his sense of the sublime. And this is one of the most prominent aspects of Macpherson's translations. In the Dean of Lismore's book, the poems do not feature much free contemplation of nature. Nature imagery comes through in descriptive analogies. In Macpherson much greater bent is given to the contemplation of nature and the sublime, independently of anything else. And this is a striking feature of his version. In part this was a reflection of contemporary sentimentalism in the melancholy poetry of writers like Young and Goldsmith. It is as a result of this influence that Macpherson's Ossian strikes the note of solemn lament it so often does.
Still though, the Scottish literati (to return to them), have been indicted to a degree as co-conspirators with Macpherson. After publishing the first fragments in 1760, Macpherson met with so much success that he appealed to the Scottish literary leaders for funds, and a subscription of several hundred pounds was made from contributors like Adam Smith. From the sources he accumulated on his journey, in 1762, he brought out Fingal. Macpherson, with the success of the Fragments, saw an opportunity, to fuse the ballads of the heroic saga into a single, epic form. And to what extent this epic version actually existed was what became most at issue.
In 1763 Macpherson brought out a second complete epic, in 8 books, Temora. Of all his Ossianic poems, this one is the least authentic, and the most invented, as only the first of its books seems to have any basis in real ballads. After Temora Macpherson would never publish anymore Ossianic poetry, and the controversy over them would rage for years. Originally David Hume gave Ossian a warm reception, but he quickly began to have doubts. Samuel Johnson was a more hostile, and immediate critic. During the first several years, Macpherson's contemporaries began to discuss their apprehensions. Hugh Blair became Macpherson's biggest public supporter, writing a full book defending the authenticity of the poems. But Hume and Johnson pushed him to make a more systematic survey of the evidence, to collect testimony, and to conduct a more thorough appraisal. Blair only got so far in this, and the evidence, at second hand, mostly was interpreted by him in favor of the poems.
June 15, 1764 Macpherson was sent to America, by Lord Bute, as secretary to George Johnstone, Governor of West Florida, a colony acquired by England in the Peace of Paris at the end of the Seven Years War. Macpherson returned to England after 15 months, in 1766. From that point on, Macpherson had seemed to prove himself as a useful man to high stationed men in the government. He had the favor of Lord Bute, George III's governor and prime minister. Macpherson retained a salary of 300 pounds yearly for his services in Florida, and upon returning to London, he expanded his activities in support of his patrons, by doing political hack writing. He took up the public support for the Government's policies during the 1770s, especially with regard to the American Revolution. It was said he authored almost all of the pamphlets published during this time in favor of the Government's position. And he wrote under 40 pseudonyms in one paper of the day organized, in part, by his publishers for Ossian and the actor David Garrick.
By Johnson, Boswell, and others, Macpherson was not well liked personally. He was 6'3'', and was described often as being somewhat gloomy, or melancholy, or withdrawn. He apparently had said he recognized no difference between virtue and vice. And was said to have some kind of contrarian nature that caused him to rail against all established systems, or something to that effect. Still though, this cannot be the full story, as he was also very successful working his political influence. He never married, and spoke of how he hated John Bull but loved his daughters. So, he was a man who liked to entertain, and socialize, and liked the company of ladies. He was seen by some, in business, to be too forward and imprudent. But it may also be said that he was a forceful advocate, and an effective one, and knew how to skillfully push his interest.
In 1775, the Ossian controversy flared up once again, as Samuel Johnson had made his journey to the western isles of Scotland to inquiry for himself into the authenticity of the Ossianic poems. Macpherson wrote to Johnson, asking him to suppress passages from his published account, Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, and Johnson responded very negatively. Macpherson was exposed to Johnson's criticism in print, but held his tongue, and was not looking to jeopardize his political successes at that time, by entering once again into public dispute over forgery. He let the matter sit, and let his Scottish defenders like Blair and Ferguson do his work for him.
In 1777, through his cousin John Macpherson, an agent of the EIC at Madras, Macpherson became a lobbyist and London agent for Mohammed Ali, the Nawab of Arcot. In 1780 Macpherson entered Parliament, as a member for Camelford, Cornwall, paying 4,000 pounds for his seat. The Nawab had entered into a dispute with the East India Company, over debts he owed to them. The company was seeking repayment, but the Nawab sought to bribe members of parliament to support his position. After the American Revolution, Parliament quickly moved to reform the East India Company to bring the country's financial situation under stricter control. Macpherson, in this battle between Parliament and the East India Company, was essentially hired to intervene in favor of the Nawab against the claims of the company.
Macpherson's later years, during the 1780s, saw him reach his highest level of political and financial success. In 1785, his cousin, Sir John Macpherson, 1st Baronet, became governor of India. Macpherson held the fort down politically in London, while his clansmen were moved into administrative positions in the company. Hugh Trevor Roper characterizes this as a huge case of graft and corruption. But details of the whole matter are difficult to come by.
In his last years, Macpherson returned to his home county, and used his fortune to buy up several estates. He built a lavish mansion and lived quite richly and contentedly for his later life during the 1790s. He died in 1795.
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Selected Bibliography:
Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson and the Ossian Fraud. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Davis, Leith. Thomas Percy: A Scholar-Cleric in the Age of Johnson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Friedman, Albert B. The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Percy's Reliques on the Romantic Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Gaskill, Howard, ed. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.
———, ed. Ossian Revisited. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
Groom, Nick. The Making of Percy's Reliques. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Haywood, Ian. The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.
Ross, Neil, ed. Heroic Poetry from the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939.
Thomson, Derick S. The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's "Ossian." Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1951.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Wolf, Friedrich August. Prolegomena to Homer. Translated, edited, and introduced by Anthony Grafton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Comments
Ellen Harold
It sounds like Macpherson did a "creative reworking.," which is how popular culture moves along. I just wish I had listened to your show when I was doing a lot of reading about what once upon a time used to be called "Pre-Romanticism" -- until they decided that it was really a version of Romanticism. I can hardly remember anything about it now. I think people like Abraham Lincoln, though -- in his efforts at self-improvement -- studied Blair's Rhetoric. He and a lot of other people. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the first one of the English language, was undoubtedly his greatest work. I just wanted to say that Johnson (and most everybody else, sadly) thought the Scots were barbaric -- they *were* very poor, which is why so many of them migrated to Canada. Yet, Johnson was a Jacobite, that is, a supporter of the Catholic Pretender. In any case, the Scottish Enlightenment had the last laugh. BYW, Hugh Trevor Roper was the author of a wonderful essay called "The European witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries." (1969). At least at the time I read it (in my twenties) I thought it was really wonderful. Now I would like to read what he had to say about Ossian. https://archive.org/details/europeanwitchcra0000trev I am also glad to hear that he was dead on about William Stephenson, talk about fraudsters.
Ellen Harold
I am not any kind of expert but just wanted to add that i was surprised to learn that Scotland never had a the English Common law and still doesn’t., if I am not mistaken.
Kantbot
Thats really interesting about the Picts. Thanks for that. Im mostly looking at the state of contemporary knowledge to some of these debates, so im curious how the modern consensus has changed. Like i think aristotles edition of homer is now considered to not really have existed. It's interesting how these debates can in some ways be so inconclusive or continue to change
Dear Death
I think Homer's work is most interesting when understood as a dialogue between oral and literate worlds—while the dialogue is more latent in the 'Iliad,' emerging only in the form itself, it becomes explicit in the 'Odyssey,' whose theme of *nostos*, or return, expresses at the same time a desire to "return" to a *homophrosyne* between the cosmic mind and man's own mind, as it was , presumably, before the "interruption" of literacy. The weird detail at the end of the Odyssey which suggests that Odysseus must plant an oar in honor of Poseidon is the expression of this attempt to reestablish harmony between the worlds of the human and the divine. Norman Austin's 'Archery at the Dark of the Moon' is a fascinating analysis of this theme in the poem. I love Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the Polyphemus episode the 'Odyssey' in the 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' as well... Oliver Taplin's 'Homeric Soundings' is a good treatment of the 'Iliad.' Thank you for doing this series!
Ethan Hunt
Thank you for this great series! Just a minor correction: there's now both genetic and linguistic evidence that the Picts were Celtic, just a different branch than the Gaelic speakers. Also, regarding Stonehenge, the position of the stones wasn't *that* different in the 1800s, before the major 1950s reconstruction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge#/media/File%3AStonehenge_1877.JPG And there's independent evidence of winter solstice alignment at Newgrange and Cairn T in Loughcrew, suggesting this was a more general feature of late Neolithic megaliths in the region.
