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Rh genuineness of Macpherson's translations was based upon an inversion of the foregoing system of reasoning. It is recorded that someone in Dr. Johnson's company drew attention to the fact that the wolf is not mentioned in Ossian, and inferred that the absence of mention of an animal which must have been common enough in the Highlands in early times was sufficient proof of forgery. Argument of this sort, if allowed, would produce somewhat ludicrous results. The "Song of Solomon" would not be genuine because it failed to mention the house-fly, an insect which must have been common enough in Judasa; and Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" could have been no sort of merit because it omitted a description of the village pump.

The refinement of sentiment indicated in Macpherson's translations was long objected to as impossible in Scotland in the early centuries of the Christian era. This was an argument used by Laing in the dissertation appended to the second volume of his History, and an argument held by him to be unanswerable. It was pointed out that the early contemporary poetry of neighbouring Gothic nations had in it a more savage spirit. The funeral song of Regner Lodbrog, for instance, a Danish poem accurately preserved from the eighth century, is full of such passages as the following:—"We have