Author: MACPHERSON (John):
Title: Critical Dissertations on the Origin, Antiquities, Language, Government,Manners and Religion, of the Antient Caledonians, Their Posterity The Pict, and the British and Irish Scots.
Description: Dublin: Printed by Boulter Grierson, Printer to the King's most Excellent Majesty, 1768 FIRST IRISH EDITION. 8vo, 180 x 115 mms., pp. xxx [xxxi - xxxii Contents], 351 [352 blank], contemporary quarter calf; boards dark and soiled, spine a little fragile, slight soiling of text. In his ODNB articles, Paul J. deGategno writes, "Macpherson's most important work, the posthumous Critical dissertations on the origin, antiquities, language, government, manners, and religion of the ancient Caledonians, their posterity the Picts, and the British and Irish Scots (1768), was a response to the Ossian phenomenon prompted by James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry and his translations of the epics Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763). An unabashed defender of Ossian and a recognized Celtic authority on antiquities, John had met James Macpherson (no relation) in September 1760 during the latter's search for Ossianic poems in the highlands. Having provided the poet with various documents on Celtic history as well as leads to various Ossian manuscripts, John recited passages of Fingal and the fragments often heard in his neighbourhood (Saunders, 123; Stafford, 117, 120). In turn James Macpherson later used material from the minister's Critical Dissertations, to which he may have contributed part of the preface, in his dissertations on the epics, as well as his Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland (1771), where he again acknowledged John's influence as an advocate of the Caledonian origins of the Scottish nation and as a critic of modern conjectural historians, such as William Robertson, whom John accused of 'looking with too much contempt on the origin of society' (Critical Dissertations, 18)."

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