About the year 1760, much speculation was excited in the literary world by the publication of a series of poems purporting to have been translated by a Mr. Macpherson, from the original Gaelic of the famous poet Ossian, whose compositions had been handed down from his own times by oral tradition. The occasion of Mr. Macpherson’s giving them to the world was as follows:--Mr. Home, author of “Douglas,” in company with other gentlemen, being at Moffat in the summer of 1759, met there Mr. Macpherson, then tutor to Mr. Graham; and from him they heard some specimens of Gaelic poetry, which so much pleased them, that they begged Mr. Macpherson to publish them in a small volume. He complied; and this specimen having attracted a good deal of attention, he proposed to make a tour, by subscription, through the Highlands, for the purpose of collecting more complete specimens of the ancient poetry. This journey he performed in 1760, and speedily published the poems in a more complete form They were received, however, by many with suspicion; it being thought, from the remoteness of the period at which they were said to have been produced, that they could not be genuine. In 1763; Dr. Hugh Blair wrote a dissertation on the poems of Ossian. This he sent to his friend David Hume, and requested to have his opinion as to the authenticity of the poems. In reply, Hume said that he never heard the dissertation mentioned, where some one or other did not express his doubt with regard to the antiquity of the poems which were the subject of it; and that he often heard them totally rejected with disdain and indignation, as a palpable and impudent forgery. The absurd pride and consequence of Macpherson, scorning, as he pretended, to satisfy any body that doubted his veracity, tended much to confirm the general scepticism: and, added Hume, “if the poems are of genuine origin, they are in all respects the greatest curiosities that were ever discovered in the history of literature.” The first regular attack on the authenticity of Ossian’s poems was made in 1781, by Mr. Shaw, the author of a Gaelic Dictionary and Grammar; and it was a vigorous one. He contended, from internal evidence, that the poems were forgeries; he asserted that many of the Highland persons who had vouched for their genuineness had never seen a line of the supposed originals, and that Macpherson himself had constantly evaded showing them to him; and he maintained, that both the fable and the machinery of the principal poems were Irish; and that if, as a blind, any manuscripts had ever been shown, they must have been in the Irish language, the Earse dialect of the Gaelic never having been written or printed till, in 1754, Mr. Macfarlane printed a translation of Baxter’s “Call to the Unconverted.” An answer was attempted by Mr. Clarke, a member of the Scottish Antiquarian Society; but, though he succeeded in some points, he failed in his principal object.