(Fall longer shadows from the lofty hills.)
Such slender proofs, it is evident, will not bear the superstructure their author sought to build upon them. Closer resemblances, it is true, may be found. Thus Laing and other critics professed to have discovered in Milton the original of the magnificent Address to the Sun at the end of "Carthon." But it should be remembered that something more than mere likeness is necessary in order to establish a charge of literary theft. As a matter of fact, one of the correspondents of the Highland Society, writing in April 1801, forwarded a copy of Ossian's Address to the Sun which he had taken down thirty years previously from the recitation of an old man in Glenlyon. This old man had learnt it in his youth, long before Macpherson was born, from people in the same glen; and his manuscript, when translated, proved almost word for word identical with the passage in "Carthon." Few people nowadays will deny that it was as natural in Ossian to sing of "white-bosomed Colma" as it was in Homer to describe "white-armed Nausicaa." Yet resemblances like these were sufficient to the minds of such critics as Mr. Laing to prove their charges of plagiarism. Ossian dare not note a weeping woman, because Andromache once wept at Troy; and his chieftains
