Sketches of Imposture, Deception, and Credulity

by R. A. Davenport

The description of Formosa was given with such apparent fidelity, the manners and customs were illustrated with so many engravings of the houses, modes of travelling, and shipping, and specimens of the language and written character so philologically explained, that, though some few persons of superior penetration looked upon the work as an imposture, the belief was almost general of the truth of the history, which was considered the more interesting, as the country described in the volume had hitherto been so imperfectly known. There appeared subsequently, by the same author, “A Dialogue between a Japanese and Formosan,” about some points of the religion of the times.

Psalmanazar was much noticed, and his ingenuity had several ordeals to undergo, from the severe examinations and investigations which the curiosity of his supporters, and the suspicion of his adversaries, prompted them to make. He had actually invented a Formosan language and grammar, into which he translated several prayers and short sentences; also a vocabulary for the benefit of those who should visit that island. With this, his native language, he was naturally supposed to be familiar, and he must have had an extraordinary and tenacious memory, not to have laid himself open to more suspicion, in the several repetitions of his examinations, which were taken down for the satisfaction of others: he at last, however, confessed that the whole was a forgery from beginning to end.

He was a man of very great general knowledge, together with natural talent, and appears by his will to have deeply regretted this imposture. His will thus commences: “The last will and testament of me, a poor simple and worthless creature, commonly known by the assumed name of George Psalmanazar.” After a devout prayer to the Supreme Being and directing that he may be buried in the humblest manner, he says, “The principal manuscript that I felt myself bound to leave behind was a faithful narrative of my education, and sallies of my wretched youthful years, and the various ways by which I was, in some measure unadvisedly, led into the base and shameful imposture of passing upon the world for a native of Formosa, and a convert to Christianity, and backing it with a fictitious account of that island, and of my own travels, conversion, &c., all or most part of it hatched in my own brain, without regard to truth or honesty. It is true I have long since disclaimed even publicly all but the shame and guilt of that vile imposition; yet as long as I knew there were still two editions of that scandalous romance remaining in England, besides the several versions it had abroad, I thought it incumbent upon me to undeceive the world, by unravelling that whole mystery of iniquity in a posthumous work.” He concludes by once more thus branding his work—“It was no other than a mere forgery of my own devising, a scandalous imposition on the public, and such as I think myself bound to beg God and the world pardon for writing, and have been long since, as I am to this day, and shall be as long as I live, heartily sorry for, and ashamed of.” This document bears date in 1752, when he was in the 73d year of his age.

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.

The absurd pride and consequence of Macpherson, scorning, as he pretended, to satisfy any body that doubted his veracity, tended much to confirm the general scepticism: and, added Hume, “if the poems are of genuine origin, they are in all respects the greatest curiosities that were ever discovered in the history of literature.”

The first regular attack on the authenticity of Ossian’s poems was made in 1781, by Mr. Shaw, the author of a Gaelic Dictionary and Grammar; and it was a vigorous one. He contended, from internal evidence, that the poems were forgeries; he asserted that many of the Highland persons who had vouched for their genuineness had never seen a line of the supposed originals, and that Macpherson himself had constantly evaded showing them to him; and he maintained, that both the fable and the machinery of the principal poems were Irish; and that if, as a blind, any manuscripts had ever been shown, they must have been in the Irish language, the Earse dialect of the Gaelic never having been written or printed till, in 1754, Mr. Macfarlane printed a translation of Baxter’s “Call to the Unconverted.” An answer was attempted by Mr. Clarke, a member of the Scottish Antiquarian Society; but, though he succeeded in some points, he failed in his principal object.

After a lapse of nearly twenty years, a more powerful antagonist of Ossian took the field. This was Mr. Malcolm Laing, author of a History of Scotland. To that history he added an elaborate dissertation, in which he skilfully investigated the claim of the poems to antiquity. The principal grounds on which he decided against it were, the many false and inaccurate allusions to the history of Britain while the country was under the dominion of the Romans; the flagrant difference between Highland manners as described in the poems and by historians; the many palpable imitations from the classics and the Scriptures; the fact that all the Highland traditionary poems yet known referred to the ninth and tenth centuries, and that there existed no Gaelic manuscript older than the fifteenth century; the resemblance which the strains of the pretended Ossian bore to The Highlander, one of Macpherson’s acknowledged compositions; and, lastly, certain startling expressions used in print by Macpherson, which seemed almost to render it certain that he was not the translator, but the author, of the works which he had given to the world under the name of Ossian.