When in 1805 Walter Scott characterized Fingal, the hero of Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1760-63), 1 as combining "all the strength and bravery of Achilles, with the courtesy, sentiment, and high-breeding of Sir Charles Grandison," he put his finger on the ethical and aesthetic compromise which it has become increasingly fashionable to see at the heart of Ossian. 2 Building on revisionist accounts of Macpherson's endeavors which stress the influence and assistance of the Scottish Enlightenment literati in the Ossian project, a coherent critical perspective has developed over recent years to explain the fascination exerted by Ossian over some of the greatest literary and philosophical minds of the age. 3 This view suggests that Ossian was in large part generated as a response to the fact that "the language of virtue in the eighteenth century was still tied to the essentially civic and masculine realm of the active and patriotic warrior-citizen" and that "on the face of it this language had little in common with the emerging discourse of passion, benevolence, and humanity." 4 In fact, "little in common" seems an understatement, given that the civic tradition at this time has been seen as explicitly oriented itself in contradistinction to the virtues of a refined society that it characterized as being "artificial, selfish, and effete." 5