eltic culture had been culturally sophisticated and colourful. However their true nature and authenticity has been debated ever since.poems undoubtedly contain information relevant to Macpherson s own time. Macpherson retained his Jacobite sympathies throughout his life, but he thought that Jacobitism was lost, confined to a past in which the old Celtic highland spirit lived on. The poems reflect this. They picture a Gaelic world in which the old order of the warriors and heroes, the spirit, romanticism and traditions of the people, of a pre-modern life without corruption, are all falling, never to rise again - a romantic world. Yet they depict that the spirit and tradition of those times will continue as an assertion by the ancient civilisation of the North of the triumph of mind and spirit over the seedy world of Hanoverian commerce and imperialism. The analogies with the current times, less than twenty years after the final fall of the Jacobite cause and the Highlands were subtle yet clear to those who knew their history and politics. Yet it was an assertion of the spirit only - the legacy of the noble savage ancestors, and not one that impacted on the contemporary world or Britishness. Nevertheless it seems likely that Macpherson really did collect a large amount of old Gaelic poems from a wide range of places and times, and that he edited and rewrote them as he saw fit to promote his message of the nobility of the old Caledonians, their loss and the endurance of their tradition. Even though their were early claims of forgery against Macpherson, the Ossianic poems turned out to be a great success across Europe and were one of the first significant works of the Romantic movement. Mighty figures such as Goethe and Napoleon were fascinated by Ossian [16, p. 75]. One had a greater influence over the recreation of the Highlands that Sir Walter Scott, the famous Lowland Scottish novelist. Scott fully supported the Union. He believed that it would heal the divides between the Scottish people and offer new horizons to them, and he actively set about seeing that this was achieved. Scot had some sympathy with Jacobitism and indeed he went on to record it as representing Scottish national feeling as a whole. Yet he saw it as a romantic past, in a similar way to Macpherson - a time of primitive emotion, passion, excitement, heroics and old traditions and an allegiance gained by the seductive Stuart charisma. He described it as having been overtaken by the new rationalism and advancement of a United Britain and its government, a process through which it inevitably had to go. Scott largely ignored the radical politics of the Jacobites and the cruel suppression of them and the highlands by the Hanoverians. He confines Jacobite politics, indeed Scotland s history as a whole, to the emotive past, with no place in the rational present or future. Scott thus stripped it of its political elements and any active role in the future, confining it to a common Scottish past which one could be proud of and yet which had no bearing on the present world. Furthermore, as stated above he advanced the Union as being able to overcome the old highland / lowland and other divides in Scotland by replacing its nationalism and its efforts in one common and rational cause. His Scotland was a museum of history and culture, denuded of the political dynamic which must keep such culture alive and developing and thus not relevant to the current political ...
