A. D.; that it was hardly used till after his death; and even then seldom employed. It has, therefore, been argued that the name could not have been familiar to a Gaelic bard of the third century. It must be remembered, however, that Ossian was not born when his father Fingal defeated the Roman general; that the bard lived to converse with Christian refugees driven into the wilds by another Roman emperor nearly a hundred years later; and that he had, therefore, every opportunity to be aware of any title disparaging to his father's enemy which might arise even long after the battle described. The classical parallels themselves, which Macpherson furnished in several notes by way of illustration to the text of Ossian, were construed as traces of forgery. When, for instance, he likened Gaul to Ajax, and the Celtic idea of a ghost to the εἰδωλον of the ancient Greeks (Fingal, B. ii.), it was asserted that he had manufactured warriors and ghosts upon Greek models. But it must occur to everyone that as a forger Macpherson would have been foolish indeed in so simply furnishing the key to his own fraud. Such proof, if allowed, would establish a charge of forging Virgil against all the editors who ever wrote notes to the Æneid. Laing made use, further, of several reported remarks of Macpherson to infer that he was willing to be considered author of these poems.
