had been present at a Speculative Society debate on the question ‘Are the
poems of Ossian authentick?’, it had been decided that the poems were
authentic without a division.
32
Constant’s remark may also betray his
anticlericalism (Macpherson did not dare to venture into an area which
might involve him in a religious dispute). Alternatively it may simply
point to Constant’s own growing awareness of how complex the history of
religions was, a result of his recent studies: on 23 November 1784 he
chose as the subject of his Speculative Society ‘Discourse’ ‘the Influence
of the Pagan Mythology on manners and character’.^33 The Discourse, like
all others from that period, was unfortunately not preserved.
By an odd coincidence mention of the Ossian controversy leads us automatically to
think of Malcolm Laing (1762–1818), ‘one of the best of [the historian] Robertson’s
successors’ as Constant calls him in Ma Vie.^34 In an appendix to his History of Scotland
from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdom (1802), Laing was to maintain
that Macpherson’s Ossian poems were of modern origin, and that Macpherson had based
them on virtually nothing of truly archaic provenance. This iconoclasm was entirely in
the character of Laing, one of the finest Scottish historians and, in Mackintosh’s words,
‘The scourge of impostors and terror of quacks’.^35 Laing, an ardent liberal and future
friend of Charles James Fox, was called to the Scottish Bar in 1785, but although ‘most
acute and ingenious’ he was handicapped by ‘an inconceivable rapidity of utterance’,
according to Mackintosh.^36 Another contemporary, Thomas Macknight is more inclined
to be charitable: ‘[his] eloquence flowed from his mouth with cataractic force &
velocity’.^37 Mackintosh and the Edinburgh Review both regretted Laing’s tendency to
strain after a brevity which sometimes obscured his meaning.^38 But Laing’s impassioned
liberalism and his hostility in debate to the power of the aristocracy were completely in
tune with Constant’s views at this time.
There was, however, at least one member of the Speculative Society still more
passionately radical than Laing, and willing in later life to risk even the hangman’s rope
for his beliefs. This man was Thomas Addis Emmet (1764–1827) who, during Constant’s
time in Edinburgh, was studying medicine, and who, after visiting medical schools on the
Continent between 1785 and 1788, returned to his native Ireland. On the advice of
Mackintosh he gave up medicine for the law, was called to the Irish Bar in 1790, and
became legal adviser to the United Irishmen. He was the elder brother of the more
famous Robert Emmet (1778–1803) who was to be executed for leading the abortive
uprising of July 1803.^39 Thomas Macknight says the following on the subject in a
memoir:
Thomas Addis Emmet—brother of Emmet who was conspicuous in
the Irish rebellion 1798 and suffered in the cause—was perhaps the
most splendid orator I ever listened to. In a few sentences after he
began, on a favourite topic, political or even moral, we were
hurried in imagination into the region of the Stars—with an endless
variety of brilliant similes—it resembled a Sky-rocket darting
among the clouds & throwing out an infinity of dazzling points;Benjamin constant 50Benjamin constant 50