¹¹Ó hÓgáin Dáithí. Fionn Mac Cumhaill: Images of the Gaelic Hero. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988. 313.
Thomas M. Curley delivers a concise indictment of Macpherson: "To be sure, the Ossian volumes were principally Macpherson's own contrivance, whether he deceived himself into believing in superhuman editorial powers for restoring a nonexistent primordial corpus of Gaelic literature or deliberately deceived others into accepting this impossibility. Composing Ossian mainly from his imagination and then calling it historically true were bad enough, even if a doubtful hypotheses of overweening self-delusion might serve to mitigate the deed. Equally damaging to his reputation was masterminding an ingenious history of early Scotland lending credibility to the bogus Ossian. This he did in his elaborate, sometimes spurious, critical apparatus accompanying his texts..." (Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 39-40.)