I do not know whether this period may not be said to have _given birth_ to another original poem; for notwithstanding its boasted antiquity, and the singularity of the style, it remains a doubt with me and many others, whether “Fingal” was not formed in this age from scraps, perhaps not modern, but of no very early date. Its sterility of ideas, the insipid sameness that reigns throughout, and the timidity with which it anxiously avoids every image that might affix it to any specific age, country, or religion, are far from bespeaking a savage bard, who the more he was original, the more he would naturally have availed himself of the images and opinions around him. Few barbarous authors write with the fear of criticism before their eyes. The moon, a storm, the troubled ocean, a blasted heath, a single tree, a waterfall, and a ghost; take these away, and Cadmus’s warriors, who started out of the earth, and killed one another before they had time to conceive an idea, were as proper heroes for an epic poem as Fingal and his captains. I will mention but two other authors of this period, Dr. Robertson, and Mrs. Macaulay. The first as sagacious and penetrating as Tacitus, with the perspicuity of Livy, and without the partialities of his own countryman, Hume, gave a perfect model of history in that of Scotland. In biography, his method and style were still preserved, though his Charles the Fifth fell far short of his other works. The female historian, as partial in the cause of liberty as bigots to the Church and royalists to tyranny, exerted manly strength with the gravity of a philosopher.[85] Too prejudiced to dive into causes, she imputes everything to tyrannic views, nothing to passions, weakness, error, prejudice, and still less to what operates oftenest, and her ignorance of which qualified her yet less for a historian,--to accident and little motives. She seems to think men have acted from no views but those of establishing a despotism or a republic. As a mixed government clashed with her system, she forgot the nation had been habituated to it, and she could not forgive the victors in the civil war for not abolishing all _established_ order, and for not shutting their ears and hearts against every connection and interest, in pursuit of a model which mad Harrington had chalked out, though impracticable, and which she was not then born to preach up. In this wild pursuit of a vision which must have rooted up every law, she is reduced to declare for the army[86] that tore out of the House of Commons the very Parliament to whom the nation had owed the first assertion of its liberties. To such absurdities are they reduced whose prejudices hurry them to extremes! If the Parliament were not the legal authority for controlling the King, where shall we say legality resides? She would answer, In the natural right of mankind to be free. That right, then, must be vindicated by force. Thence we revert to a state of nature.