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Rh in 1773. But, disgusted by the treatment he had received, he refused during his life to print another word of the originals. Only at his death it was found that he had left a thousand pounds to defray the cost of their publication. From various causes the appearance of the Gaelic text was delayed, and its issue, which would have gone far to set the question at rest, was only effected by the Highland Society of London, in 1807. By that time the forgeries of Chatterton had prejudiced the public mind, the war of words was over, and the ear of England was throbbing with the greater thunders of Trafalgar Bay.

The rest of Macpherson's career may be briefly sketched. In 1764 he went out to Pensacola as private secretary to the Governor there. A difference, however, arising, he gave up the position, made a tour through the West India Islands, and returned to London in 1766 with a pension of £200 a-year. In 1771 a volume of Gaelic antiquities which he published under the title of An Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, was most bitterly attacked upon its appearance. This, with the similar abusive reception accorded his prose translation of the Iliad of Homer, published in two volumes in 1773, serves to shew that the attitude towards him of the literary cliques of London had not altered in ten years