(2) He rejoices in descriptions of Scottish scenery and customs. _The Cotter’s Saturday Night_ is packed with such features, and all through his work are glimpses of typical Scottish scenes. The opening stanzas of _A Winter Night_ are often quoted to show his descriptive power: When biting Boreas, fell and doure, Sharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r; When Phœbus gives a short-liv’d glow’r, Far south the lift, Dim-dark’ning thro’ the flaky show’r, Or whirling drift: Ae night the storm the steeples rocked, Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked, While burns, wi’ snawy wreeths up-choked, Wild-eddying swirl, Or thro’ the mining outlet bocked,[168] Down headlong hurl. (3) Lastly, he came just at the time when the Scottish tongue, as a separate literary medium, was fast vanishing. The Edinburgh society that prided itself on being the equal of the literary society of London was soon to pass away with the greatest of Edinburgh writers. Burns captured the dialect of his fellows, and gave it permanence. OTHER POETS OF THE NEW SCHOOL =1. James Macpherson (1738–96).= This writer was born at Kingussie, in the county of Inverness, and was educated for the Church. He never became a regular minister, for at the age of twenty he was producing bad poetry, and soon after he definitely adopted a literary career. He traveled in the Highlands of Scotland and abroad, settled in London (1764), and meddled in the politics of the time. Then he entered Parliament, realized a handsome fortune, and died in his native parish. After producing some worthless verse in the conventional fashion, in 1760 he issued something very different. It was called _Fragments of Ancient Poetry translated from the Gaelic_. The work received a large share of attention, and a subscription was raised to allow him to travel in the Highlands to glean further specimens of native poetry. The fruits of this were seen in _Fingal_ (1762) and _Temora_ (1763). Macpherson declared that the books were his translations of the poems of an ancient Celtic bard called Ossian. Immediately a violent dispute broke out, many people (including Johnson) alleging that the books were the original compositions of Macpherson himself. The truth is that he gave substance to a large mass of misty Gaelic tradition, and cast the stories into his peculiar prose style. The controversy hardly matters to us here. What matters is that the tales deal largely with the romantic adventures of a mythical hero called Fingal. They include striking descriptions of wild nature, and they are cast in a rhythmic and melodious prose that is meant to reproduce the original Gaelic poetical measure. As an essay in the Romantic method these works are of very high value. (See p. 349.)