Nothing daunted by this, and a hundred other similar rebuffs; Macpherson, like Mallett before him, but with twenty times his abilities, pursued his peculiar course. He was appointed agent for the Nabob of Arcot, and became M.P. for Carnelford. In this way he speedily accumulated a handsome fortune, and in 1789, while still a youngish man, he retired to his native parish, where he bought the estate of Raitts, and founded a splendid villa, called Belleville, where, in ease and affluence, he spent his remaining days. Surviving Johnson, his ablest opponent, by twelve years, he died on the 17th of February 1796, in the full view of Ossian's country. One of his daughters became his heir, and another was the first wife of Sir David Brewster. Macpherson in his will ordered that his body should be buried in Westminster Abbey, and left a sum of money to erect a monument to him near Belleville. He lies, accordingly, in Poets' Corner, and a marble obelisk to his memory may be seen near Kingussie, in the centre of some trees. There is nothing new that is true, or true that is new, to be said about the questions connected with Ossian's Poems. That Macpherson is the sole author is a theory now as generally abandoned as the other, which held that he was simply a free translator of the old bard. To the real fragments of Ossian, which he found in the Highlands, he acted very much as he did to the ancient property of Raitts, in his own native parish. This he purchased in its crude state, and beautified into a mountain paradise. He changed, however, its name into Belleville, and it had been better if he had behaved in a similar way with the poems, and published them as, with some little groundwork from another, the veritable writings of James Macpherson, Esq. The ablest opponent of his living reputation was, as we said, Johnson; and the ablest enemy of his posthumous fame has been Macaulay. We are at a loss to understand _his_ animosity to the author of Ossian. Were the Macphersons and Macaulays ever at feud, and did the historian lose his great-great-grandmother in some onslaught made on the Hebrides by the progenitors of the pseudo-Ossian? Macpherson as a man we respect not, and we are persuaded that the greater part of Ossian's Poems can be traced no further than his teeming brain. Nor are we careful to defend his poetry from the common charges of monotony, affectation, and fustian. But we deem Macaulay grossly unjust in his treatment of Macpherson's genius and its results, and can fortify our judgment by that of Sir Walter Scott and Professor Wilson, two men as far superior to the historian in knowledge of the Highlands and of Highland song, and in genuine poetic taste, as they were confessedly in original imagination. The former says, 'Macpherson was certainly a man of high talents, and his poetic powers are honourable to his country.' Wilson, in an admirable paper in _Blackwood_ for November 1839, while admitting many