Page:Poems of Ossian.djvu/37

Rh evidence it became impossible to declare the translation of Ossian altogether spurious. It was still possible, however, for impugners of that work to declare that Macpherson, instead of strictly translating, had expanded and improved upon the remains which he found. Obviously the burden lay with the assailants of Macpherson's work to prove their assertion true, and had their charge been well founded, the task should not have been difficult. They had only to point out in these poems an image or an epithet which could not have occurred to the Gaelic bard, in order to show that Macpherson had used unwarranted freedom in making his translation. In such a criticism, of course, two facts must be kept in view: (1) that compositions passed down from century to century by mere word of mouth must inevitably suffer some variation and corruption; and (2) that the version to be criticised was a translation, liable to be varied somewhat in complexion by the translator's choice of phrase. But Macpherson was a man of university education, imbued with the lore of classical antiquity. His work, besides, was done during the most conventional age of English poetry, fifty years before Scott and Byron appeared to break the fetters of Pope; and his own early poems are strongly marked with stiff conventionality. His verses are full of "blythsome shepherds" and