The philosopher David Hume, already celebrated in his day as the author of Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), was at first an enthusiast for the Ossian prose poems but increasingly had doubts: he declared to James Boswell that “if fifty barea–ed highlanders should say that Fingal was an ancient Poem, he would not believe them.” He could not credit that a people who were forever concerned to keep themselves from starving or being hanged should preserve in their memories a poem in six books. In other words, the Highlanders were hopelessly illiterate, a Lowland view that had persisted at least from the days of King James VI, who had proclaimed Gaelic-speaking Highlanders “utterly barbarous”—that is, they did not behave according to the civilized manners of the time.

Dining at David Garrick's in London, Hume met Edmund Burke, who told him that the Irish protested they knew all these Ossian poems, but he could never find anyone able to repeat the original verses. Burke, at least, had been exposed in his youth to Irish Gaelic, but Hume and many other Lowland Scottish literati were not at all familiar with the contiguous Celtic language and rich oral tradition of their own Highlands. Even in his own lifetime that tradition was producing, at midcentury, poets of the quality of Dugald Buchanan (1716–68), Rob Donn (Robert Mackay, 1714–78), Alexander MacDonald (ca. 1698–1770), and Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812). The last of these moved to Edinburgh in 1767, serving as a constable in the City Guard from then until 1806, and his poems were published there in 1768. In 1769 Hume himself finally settled in Edinburgh, living in the city until his death seven years later. In any case, the pull of literature and aesthetics in “North Britain” at the time was toward the classical world, and to France.

The effect of Macpherson's poems, for one astute critic of the time, was of “personal intonations” rather than “literal translations”—what we might call a kind of literary ventriloquism.