Alexander Macdonald, in a volume on the subject published at Liverpool in 1805, sufficiently met Laing's sweeping assertions and unhesitating inferences. And the "dissertations" of Dr. Blair, Dr. Graham, Sir John Sinclair, and many others, offered abundant argument supporting the authenticity of the Ossianic poems.
The alternative objection urged both by Johnson and Hume against the bona-fide character of Macpherson's translations, was that the human memory is incapable of retaining compositions of such length. And in these days of printed books, almanacs, and universal note-taking, the objection presents some plausibility. The same argument was urged in 1795 by the German professor, F. A. Wolf, and others, against the authenticity of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. But Macpherson, it should be remembered, did not profess to have gathered his materials complete from the recitation of a single individual. He found them in scattered fragments, and exercised his judgment in piecing them together. A parallel case might be cited in the Kalewala of Finland, an epic poem of which Dr. E. Lönnrost collected and published in 1849
ment from the Literary Journal of 1784, in which Mr. Beckett, Macpherson's publisher, certifies that the Gaelic MSS. of Ossian have been exposed for public inspection during twelve months at his shop in the Strand.
