James Macpherson

James Macpherson 1736-96, Scottish author. Educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, he spent his early years as a schoolmaster. In later life he held a colonial secretaryship in West Florida (1764-66), and he was a member of Parliament from 1780 until his death. In 1760, at the insistence of John Home and others, he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, supposedly his own translations of ancient Gaelic poems. Later he published translations of two epic poems, Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), which were represented as the work of a 3d-century Irish bard named Ossian. A collection, The Works of Ossian, appeared in 1765. Samuel Johnson and others heatedly challenged the authenticity of the poems. After Macpherson's death an investigating committee of scholars agreed that he had used some ancient Gaelic poems and traditions, but composed most of the supposedly ancient poetry himself. His prose poems, written in a loose, rhythmical style, filled with supernaturalism and melancholy, influenced powerfully the rising romantic movement in literature, especially German literature. Macpherson also wrote several histories.

Bibliography: See T. B. Saunders, Life and Letters of James Macpherson (1894, repr. 1969); study by D. S. Thomson (1951); I. Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to 18th Century Ideas of History and Fiction (1987).

Macpherson, James (1736–96), met John Home in 1759, for whom he produced his first ‘Ossianic’ fragment ‘The Death of Oscar’; encouraged by Home and Hugh Blair he then produced Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language (1760). Interest in primitivism was at this period considerable; pressed on by his admirers, Macpherson travelled round Scotland collecting the materials for Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books (1762). It purported to be Macpherson's faithful translation of an epic by Ossian, the son of Finn (or, in this version, Fingal), dating from some vague but remote period of early Scottish history. A second epic, Temora (1763), followed with suspicious speed. These works created a great sensation among patriotic Scots. Hume and Adam Smith were at first convinced by them: Home and Blair remained so. Ossian's fame spread to the Continent; Goethe quoted Ossian at length in The Sorrows of Young Werther. At home doubts of the poems' authenticity sprang up almost at once, with Dr Johnson as the most formidable of sceptics. Macpherson, when called upon to produce his originals, was obliged to fabricate them. A committee appointed after his death, chaired by Henry Mackenzie, investigated the mystery and reported in 1805 that Macpherson had liberally edited Gaelic poems and inserted passages of his own. The immense popularity of the poetry survived the exposure of its origins.

MacPherson, James (1738–93). Man of letters, and the moving force behind the discovery of the Poems of Ossian. Taken up by the Edinburgh literati in 1760 as a Gaelic speaker with a taste for bardic verse, he was sent to the Highlands to search for more substantial works. These were quickly discovered, translated, and published 1762–5, prefaced by long and influential essays by MacPherson and the critic Hugh Blair. MacPherson was immediately accused of forgery, a charge which he resented, but never tried to rebut. His literary career faltered although his free version of the Illiad (1773) is not without interest and his History of Great Britain from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover (1775) achieved a limited success. He died in 1790, having made a living as a government propagandist and a fortune as agent of the nabob of Arcot.

Nicholas Phillipson