In the posthumous memoirs above alluded to he studiously concealed who he really was. It appears, however, that he was born about 1679, in the south of France, either in Provence or Languedoc; and having been guilty of some great excesses in the university where he was receiving his education,--though he does not explain the nature of them,--he found it necessary to take to flight, and wandered clandestinely through a great part of Europe. Finding it both troublesome and hazardous to preserve his incognito as an European, he determined on the plan of imposture which ultimately led him to write his fictitious history of the island of Formosa. The latter part of his life was spent in the practice of the most unfeigned piety. He supported himself by his literary labours, and was the author of a considerable portion of the Ancient Universal History. His death took place in 1763.
About the year 1760, much speculation was excited in the literary world by the publication of a series of poems purporting to have been translated by a Mr. Macpherson, from the original Gaelic of the famous poet Ossian, whose compositions had been handed down from his own times by oral tradition. The occasion of Mr. Macpherson’s giving them to the world was as follows:--Mr. Home, author of “Douglas,” in company with other gentlemen, being at Moffat in the summer of 1759, met there Mr. Macpherson, then tutor to Mr. Graham; and from him they heard some specimens of Gaelic poetry, which so much pleased them, that they begged Mr. Macpherson to publish them in a small volume. He complied; and this specimen having attracted a good deal of attention, he proposed to make a tour, by subscription, through the Highlands, for the purpose of collecting more complete specimens of the ancient poetry. This journey he performed in 1760, and speedily published the poems in a more complete form They were received, however, by many with suspicion; it being thought, from the remoteness of the period at which they were said to have been produced, that they could not be genuine.
In 1763; Dr. Hugh Blair wrote a dissertation on the poems of Ossian. This he sent to his friend David Hume, and requested to have his opinion as to the authenticity of the poems. In reply, Hume said that he never heard the dissertation mentioned, where some one or other did not express his doubt with regard to the antiquity of the poems which were the subject of it; and that he often heard them totally rejected with disdain and indignation, as a palpable and impudent forgery.