Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 35.djvu/271

Macpherson also had a villa on Putney Common, to which he often retired, and where he entertained his friends.

When his health began to fail he returned to his native Inverness-shire, bought an estate in Badenoch, and, changing its name from Raitts to Belville, built himself a mansion, which, however, he did not live to see entirely finished. He treated his tenants with good-natured indulgence, and grew domestic and religious. In his last illness he was constant in imploring divine mercy, and he refused all remedies, feeling that his hour was come. He died at Belville on 17 Feb. 1796. By his will, dated June 1793, he left 500l. for a monument to himself on his estate, and directed that he should be buried in the abbey of Westminster, ‘being the city wherein he had lived and passed the greatest and best part of his life.’ His body, after being eighteen days on the road to London, was met at Highgate by several coaches, and on 15 March 1796 was buried in the south transept of the abbey, not far from Poets' Corner.

Macpherson's portrait was painted by Reynolds, and engraved by Samuel Freeman [q. v.] He was a big man, good-looking, and with thick legs, to hide which he wore top-boots, though not then in fashion. He was proud, reserved, and on the subject of Ossian easily offended. His life was somewhat irregular. Johnson in his famous letter declared that what he heard of Macpherson's morals inclined him to attend not to what he should say, but to what he should prove. Mrs. Anne Grant, his neighbour in Inverness-shire, who described his last days, speaks of him as excluded from domestic life by unhappy connections and tavern company, the prey of toad-eaters and designing house-keepers (Letters from the Mountains, iii. 32). He left four illegitimate children: James, who succeeded to the estates; Charles, who died in India; Anne, who succeeded James and died unmarried at Belleville in 1862 (Gent. Mag. s.a. ii. 236); and Juliet, who in July 1810 married Sir David Brewster. Their son took the additional name of Macpherson. It is unfortunate that Macpherson's journal, which, according to Brewster, contained important information as to the composition of the Ossianic poems, and was for other reasons carefully guarded by the family, mysteriously disappeared in 1868.

Boswell in 1785 declared that public interest in the question of the authenticity of the Ossianic poems was at an end, but on Macpherson's death the controversy broke out afresh. In 1797 the Highland Society of Scotland appointed a committee to investigate the poems ascribed to Ossian. While the committee was at work, criticism took a new form in the hands of Malcolm Laing [q. v.], who, first in an appendix to his ‘History of Scotland,’ Edinburgh, 1800, ii. 377, and afterwards in an elaborate edition of the ‘Poems of Ossian,’ denounced the whole of them as unhistorical, and a mere patchwork of plagiarism from a hundred sources. He further attempted to show that the ‘Fragments,’ published while their author was studying divinity, were tinged with the phrases of his professional pursuits, and that there was scarcely a page of ‘Fingal’ or ‘Temora’ which could not be proved to owe its inspiration to some passage in classical or modern literature. Laing particularly mentioned two instances of plagiarism from ‘Paradise Lost.’ Scott, who thought that the greater part of the poems were Macpherson's own composition, especially the descriptions of scenery and the romantic sentiment, noticed Laing's work sympathetically in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ July 1805. Laing's attack was ably, if not conclusively, answered by Patrick. Graham in his ‘Essay on the Authenticity of Ossian,’ Edinburgh, 1807. Graham admitted that much of ‘Fingal’ and ‘Temora’ consisted of episodes for which there were no authentic originals.

The ‘Highland Society's Report,’ prepared with great care and scrupulous fairness, was presented in 1805, with an appendix of letters and affidavits received in answer to queries which the committee had framed and addressed to various persons throughout the highlands. The ‘Report's’ conclusion was: (1) That a great legend of Fingal and Ossian, his son and songster, had immemorially existed in Scotland, and that Ossianic poetry, of an impressive and striking character, was still found generally and in great abundance in the highlands; (2) That while fragments were found giving the substance and sometimes the literal expression of parts of Macpherson's work, no one poem was discoverable the same in title or tenor with his publications. Further, the committee inclined to believe (3) that he had liberally edited his originals and inserted passages of his own. But the committee recognised that the social changes which had taken place in the highlands since Macpherson wrote had largely destroyed the practice of orally reciting Gaelic poems, and that the opportunities of research had thus been diminished.

In 1807 Dr. Ross somewhat carelessly edited for the society what it had received from John Mackenzie, Macpherson's executor, as exact transcripts of the Gaelic originals. These papers, all in Macpherson's own hand or in that of an amanuensis, had passed under Macpherson's will to his executor,