penetration and acuteness can find anything anywhere." Laing asserted in his preface that he had traced "every simile and almost every poetical image" in Macpherson's translations "to their source;" and his charges of minute, learned, and painstaking ingenuity in plagiarism would, if substantiated, prove Macpherson the most marvellous phenomenon of literary industry, sagacity, and intelligence the world has ever seen.
An instance or two of this ingenious detective faculty of Mr. Laing, taken quite at random, may show the reliance to be placed on his criticism. In the second book of "Fingal" occurs the simile, "Faintly he raised his feeble voice like the gale of the reedy Lego." The first part of this Laing derived from the Iliad, xxiii., 105, ὤχετο τετριγῡια (with a faint shriek he was gone). The second part, "the gale of reedy Lego," the critic felt certain Macpherson had borrowed from his own lines in "The Highlander"—
As breezes sing through reeds their shrilly song."
Again, in the "War of Caros" occurs the simile, "It is like the field, when darkness covers the hills around, and the shadow grows slowly on the plain of the sun." This Laing considered stolen from Virgil's
