¹⁴Boswell, James, Georges Birkbeck Norman Hill, and Lawrence Fitzroy Powell. Boswell's Life of Johnson: Together with Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales : in Six Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. I: 396.
According to Thomas M. Curley, "...Johnson was the arch-enemy of falsehood in the Ossian business, not only for offending against morality but also for violating authentic history and the simple human trust that makes society possible...truth in literature and life is a perennial human concern inextricably tied to the survival and fulfillment of the race." (Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 42. 2-3.)
Scottish philosopher David Hume was said to have told Boswell that "if fifty bare- arsed highlanders should say that Fingal was an ancient poem, he would not believe them. He said it was not to be believed that a people who were continually concerned to keep themselves from starving or from being hanged, should preserve in their memories a Poem in six books." (Porter, James. "'Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson': The Execution of Ossian and the Wellsprings of Folkloristic Discourse." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 414-15.)