Better fortune must have attended the publication in 1775 of his History of Great Britain, from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover, with its companion volumes of Original Papers; for he is said to have received for this work the sum of £3000. The Government also employed him to write two pamphlets in defence of their action in the dispute and rupture with America. And on being appointed agent in Britain for the Nabob of Arcot he was provided with a seat in Parliament. Failing in health at last, he retired to Belleville, a mansion he had built in Alvie, Inverness-shire, where he died on the 17th February 1796. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Upon the first appearance of Macpherson's translations of Ossian, the foremost, naturally, in the attack upon their authenticity was Dr. Samuel Johnson. The great lexicographer was followed, however, by such a northern supporter as Dr. Smith of Campbelltown. The natural sceptic bias of Hume's mind led him to take the same side. And Mr. Malcolm Laing, author of a set of "Notes and Illustrations" to Ossian, printed at Edinburgh in 1805, finally professed to set the question at rest by showing how everything in Macpherson's translations had been stolen from such sources as the Bible and Homer. An
