Coldly correct, to Shakespeare’s Warblings wild?’ asked Joseph Warton in The
Enthusiast: or, The Lover of Nature (1744). Joseph and his brother Thomas wrote
verse imitating Spenser and Milton’s Penseroso, where ‘sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s
child, / Warbles his native woodnotes wild’. Thomas’s History of English Poetry
(1774–81) preferred medieval and Elizabethan poetry to that of the period when
‘Late, very late, correctness grew our care’ (Pope). Uncorrected warbling thus
preceded Wordsworth’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads by fifty years. In his Spenserian The
Castle of Indolence (1748), James Thomson portrayed poetic idleness as reprehensi-
ble but inviting. In a second Canto, the Knight of Industry, who had made Britannia
the land of freedom, liberates (with the help of a bard) the Castle’s more virtuous
inmates. Gray’s other themes – melancholy, marginality, craziness and extinction –
are found in the lives of the poets William Collins (1721–1759; melancholia),
Christopher Smart (1722–1771; the asylum), Thomas Chatterton (b.1753; dead by
his own hand at 17), William Cowper (1731–1800; suicidal melancholia) and
George Crabbe (1754–1832; occasional melancholia). The triumph of sensibility,
and its taste for fancy and the primitive sublime, is shown by the phenomenon of
‘Ossian’ Macpherson (1736–1796).
Thomson was a border Scot who, like many Irish and Scots, chose to mingle with
the English epicures. He left Edinburgh before the Scottish Enlightenment of David
Hume and Adam Smith. Other Enlightenment figures, Hugh Blair and Joseph Hone,
wished to preserve something of the culture of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands,
suppressed after the Jacobite rising crushed at Culloden in 1746. In 1759,
Macpherson, a young Highlander, translated a Gaelic fragment Hone had collected,
a piece on the death of Oscur, beginning ‘Why openest thou afresh the spring of my
grief, O son of Alpin, inquiring how Oscur fell?’ Sent off to collect others,
Macpherson produced Fr agments of Ancient Poetry in 1760, to instant acc laim; then
Fingal: An Epic Poem in Six Books (1761),Te mora: An Ancient Epic Poem in Eight
Books (1763) and The Works of Ossian (1765). Success, repeated in London, was
amplified in Europe, where Goethe found Ossian superior to Homer. Fifty years later
Napoleon had scenes from Ossian painted on his bedroom ceiling. Not so Dr
Johnson, who challenged Macpherson to produce the original manuscripts; he failed
to do so;co ntroversy continues. (The first extant manuscript of any Scots Gaelic
verse dates from 1512, whereas the original Ossian was a 3rd-century oral Ir ish
bard.) On seeing the Fragments Gray was ‘exstasiéwith their infinite beauty’, a
modern aesthetic reaction; authenticity or spuriousness were immaterial.
Macpherson, it seems, processed scraps of oral verse into a strange English printed
pr ose. Original translation! (The Scottish divine, Hugh Blair, asked whether many
men could have written such poems. Johnson: ‘Many men, many women, and many
children.’) The Fragments, out of print until recently, are in a rhythmical prose remi-
niscent of translated Old Testament texts. Fragment 8 begins:
By the side of a rock on the hill beneath the aged trees, old Oscian sat on the moss; the
last of the race of Fingal. Sightless are his aged eyes; his beard is waving in the wind. Dull
through the leafless trees he heard the voice of the north. Sorrow revived in his soul: he
began and lamented the dead.However little is due to ‘Ossian’ and however much to Macpherson, the Fragments
appealed – as fragments, to be completed by the fancy. All are sad and noble, all
remember death, often caused by love, in landscapes of loss. Modern Gaels object
that the voice supplied for them is a broken voice.
THE EMERGENCE OF SENSIBILITY 209Jacobite Supportive of the
claims of King James II (Lat.
Jacobus), his heirs, and the
Stuart dynasty, to the British
throne.