SOURCE: "The Fugitives from the Happy Valley," in The Peace of the Augustans: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment, Oxford University Press, 1946, pp. 286-334.

In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1916, Saintsbury discusses the poetic merit of Macpherson's Ossianic poems apart from the issue of their authenticity.

It has been said that it requires considerable critical exercise or expertness to appreciate, in any critical fashion, the charm of Gray's Elegy. It may be added that even greater preparation is required before any modern man can really appreciate Ossian. The penalty of enthusiastic and unhesitating acceptance, at once, of such a work of art as this by any generation has—not quite universally but almost so—been future distaste if not disgust. The extraordinarily fashionable almost inevitably becomes the irreconcilably unfashionable. With singular felicity or singular cleverness (he showed...