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.
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