James Macpherson - author of Ossian and Fingal
Biography
Birth: 1736
Death: 1796
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 December 11, 1762, and described him as a genius and as an honest Scottish highlander. On May 1, 1763, 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" . They met occasionally in the following years. On May 20, 1763 they walked together in Hyde Park, and Macpherson apparentlyt was "railing against the human species, and in vast discontent".
Recommended literature
Various books by or about Macpeherson are available from the AbeBooks used books search engine. At Questia Online 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.
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