Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/176

 170 Whitford pages, therefore, will portray satire's view of Macpherson's Ossian, the sentimental drama, the rhymes of the Bath-easton rhymers and the Delia Cruscans, and the Sensibility of the Bluestockings. James Macpherson was a Scotch Tory, writing for the party in power in the days of the American War, but his Ossianic poems were a driven well bubbling and gurgling with sentiment. The earliest satirical comments concerning him treated of the outlandishness of his material and the doubtful antiquity of its dress. William Mason, who often flung jibes at Macpherson, remarked thus upon the creation of Fingal: Mac, like a poet stout and good, First plung'd, then pluck'd him from oblivion's flood, And bad him bluster at his ease, Among the fruitful Hebrides. 32 In one of the anonymous satires on the American Revolution, A New Scheme to Raise a New Corps, a ballad-writing humorist suggested that the loss of the Scotch Militia could be supplied by raising and equipping a brigade of orang-outangs: And as their jabbering smacks of Erse, Let them recite MAC OSSIAN'S verse, To fire their souls to glory. 33 In M' Fingal (1776 and 1782), the popular American satirist Trumbull cast many a satirical glance at Macpherson. A little later, the author of a "probationary ode" for John Wilkes ridiculed Macpherson's lofty epic roar, Barren and rough as his own native shore. 34 These, however, were but casual bits. By far the most remarkable literary satire upon Macpherson was one of the original Probationary Odes. Though not comparable in viol- ence to Lord Thurlow's ode, where six d-mns appear in five lines, this represents the literary satire of the Rolliad group at 32 New Foundling Hospital for Wit, II, 49-50; Ode to Pinchbeck, published first in 1776. 33 New Foundling Hospital, II, 96. "Miscellaneous Works oj A. M' Donald (London, 1791), 88.