In the fourth book of "Fingal," for instance, he hums "as was his wont in danger, the songs of heroes of old." For this reason the high epic and dramatic art exhibited in his works need no more be matter of objection than the same art in the Iliad and Odyssey.
But the most subtle, perhaps, of all kinds of criticism used to prove that Macpherson added passages of his own to the text of Ossian was that brought to bear upon the subject by Mr. Knight. In his Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste, 1805, he remarks—"In describing the common appearances of nature, the bards of unpolished nations are scrupulously exact; so that an extravagant hyperbole, in a matter of this kind, is sufficient to mark as counterfeit any composition attributed to them. . . . James Macpherson, in the person of his blind bard, could say with applause in the eighteenth century, 'Thus have I seen in Cona; but Cona I behold no more: thus have I seen two dark hills removed from their place by the strength of the mountain stream. They turn from side to side, and their tall oaks meet one another on high. Then they fall together with all their rocks and trees.'—(Fingal, B. v.) But had a bard presumed to utter such a rhapsody of bombast in the hall of shells, amid the savage warriors to whom Ossian is supposed to have sung, he would have needed all the influence of royal
