Item 166 - Letter from D. C. Tovey to Henry Sidgwick

Refers to their meeting on the previous Wednesday, and their discussion in relation to James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian. Reports that on returning home he fetched out a duplicate proof of a paper he wrote on the subject a year previously, and now sends to Sidgwick [not included]. Refers to the paper as 'the conclusion arrived at by a man who had read just Macpherson's Ossian and the last apologist for Macpherson and "combined his information".' Reports that when the man he reviewed replied to him, Tovey discovered that he had not studied 'the thing he wrote about'. Discusses the work, and the reaction of Tovey and Sidgwick to it, and to 'the passages reproduced in [Goethe's] Werther'. Suggest that Macpherson 'might have developed into a poet of high rank on his own account'. Confesses that it is very seldom that he has an opportunity of talking to anyone about such things, and that Sidgwick's nephew Arthur Benson is the only friend to whom he has written 'about books etc. for many months.'