This literature, indeed, was being steadily thrust further out of the cultivated world. Two years before the poet’s father was born, Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw had written the ballad fragment of ‘Hardyknute’ with genuine folk skill; in the next generation such interest as remained was contaminated with literary sophistication. The gentlefolk of William Burnes’s generation could no longer write true ballads, but they could and did write true folk-songs, as witness Jean Elliot’s ‘Flowers of the Forest’, Alison Cockburn’s ‘I’ve seen the smiling of Fortune beguiling’, and John Skinner’s ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John o’ Badenyon’. The gentlefolk of Robert Burns’s generation had lost this power too. Burns was six years old when Percy’s _Reliques_ inaugurated the serious study of popular literature and let loose the spate of forgery and imitation of which Macpherson’s _Ossian_ was the most brilliant success. The national will to believe in Macpherson’s fabrication was proof alike against the scorn of Dr. Johnson and the learning of antiquaries. To many Scots besides Burns Ossian was the ‘prince of poets’, to be read and admired as a patriotic duty, even if few of his vague and turgid phrases could be remembered long enough to quote. And what Macpherson did on the grand scale ballad ‘editors’ like John Pinkerton were doing on a small one, debasing even their genuine material with sentimental trash which blinded many readers to the merits of a really honest and accurate editor like David Herd.