Biography

James Macpherson. (1736-1796) (aka. Ossian, Fingal)

Poet and translator. Studied at Edinburgh University (Did Boswell know him from there?). Gained initial fame when he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gallic or Erse Language in 1760. This publication enabled him to travel around Scotland in search of ancient litterature. The result was published as Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763). Warmly received in some literary circles (Hugh Blair and others) figures such as David Hume and Samuel Johnson were sceptical about the authenticity of the poems. After his death in 1796 a committee concluded that he had treated the Gaelic poems in a free and selective fashion, adding much verse of his own invention. From 1763 to 1766 he worked as a secretary to the Governor of Florida, and then returned to London where he worked as historian, lobbyist and political pamphleteer (Link) for the remainder of his life. He died in 1796 as is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Life with James Boswell:

Boswell lunched with Macpherson on 11/12-62, and described him as a genius and as an honest Scottish highlander. On 1/5-63, following Macphersons arrival back in London from a journey to Holland and France with Lord Elibank, Boswell and Machpherson breakfasted together. On this occasion Macpherson said "that to retain our high ideas of anything, we should not see it" - which seems to suggest that if we want to do anything, let's not... They met occasionally in the following years. On 20/5-63 they walked together in Hyde Park, and Macpherson was described as "railing against the human species, and in vast discontent".

External links:

• James Macpherson
• A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of F - by Hugh Blair, D.D.

Literature:

From Amazon.co.uk

• Fragments of Ancient Poetry
• The Poems of Ossian
• Fingal: an Ancient Epic...

If you find nothing of interest on Amazon, you might try the Abebooks used books search engine. At Questia, The Internet's Largest Library you can get instant access to litterature about Macpherson such as Fiona Stafford's (1988) The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian, and others.

This article was last updated at February 12 2008 23:18:36 CET

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