Macpherson publishes the Ossian fragments

1760

James Macpherson published 'Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland' in 1760, followed by Fingal in 1761 and Temora in 1763, presenting them as translations of a third-century Gaelic bard, Ossian. They became a European sensation and shaped Romanticism. Samuel Johnson denounced Macpherson as a fraud, and Charles O'Conor attacked the work in 1766 and 1775. Modern consensus is that Macpherson largely composed the poems himself while drawing on genuine Gaelic material he had collected.