A series of five talks on some instances of learned invention and forgery
3-ossian: an eighteenth-century controversy by Robin Lorimer
When James Macpherson published his supposed translations of the ancient Gaelic poetry of Scotland there was an air of mystery about the circumstances which was enough to disconcert even those who, like Thomas Gray , were immediately impressed by the quality and originality of the writingt The deception was stridently exposed by Dr. Johnson and more urbanely by David Hume , but the Celtic twilight which Macpherson created caught the imagination of the early Romantics and has survived all the strictures of the learned.