Alongside this honest love of native things, whether expressed in a girl’s singing at her harpsichord or in David Herd’s careful recording of old words, another literature was growing up of imitation, forgery, and ‘improvement’. It had become a literary convention for every composer of an imitation ballad to offer it to the public as a copy from an ancient manuscript. Though a few of these imitations, like the ‘Hardyknute’ of Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, were close enough to the spirit of folk literature to deceive even experts, the mass of them were so mawkish and verbose as to bring the term ‘Scottish poetry’ to the verge of contempt. Primacy in these qualities, as in popularity, belonged to James Macpherson’s alleged translations of the poems of Ossian--a work passionately defended by the Scots because it depicted their savage ancestors as a trifle more chivalrous and vastly more sentimental than Bayard or Sidney, admired on the Continent because it supported the current delusion about the nobility of man in a state of nature, and cherished by Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the simple pleasures which appeal to the enterprising burglar in his hours of relaxation. But the harm done to traditional literature by imitations and forgeries was trivial compared with that inflicted by some of those people who professed to admire it. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the teaching of music in Edinburgh had passed largely into the hands of foreigners. Names like Domenico Corri, Pietro Urbani, and Theodor Schetki are as prevalent on title-pages as their owners were on the concert stage, and under this Italianate influence many traditional melodies were ‘harmonized’ and ‘improved’ until all their native vigour was lost in empty flourishes. And as with the music, so with the words. ‘Correct’ and sentimentalized lyrics were substituted for the sturdy old words, remained in use long enough to push the latter into oblivion, and then, their novelty gone, themselves sank into disuse and dragged the music with them. This effort to refine the national heritage of music was merely one phase of the whole sense of provincial inferiority which afflicted Scotland. Italian music and English literature, speech, and manners, were the ideals towards which genteel Scots strained. National pride in James Thomson and John Home exulted more in the fact that they wrote English acceptable in England than in their use of Scottish materials. Even the devastating scepticism of David Hume was forgiven him because he had almost purified his language of Scotticisms. When Johnson ridiculed Hume’s English Boswell writhed in agony, and was correspondingly elated when the dictator praised Blair’s sermons and was moved to tears by Beattie’s _Minstrel_.