17McKean, Thomas A. "The Fieldwork Legacy of James Macpherson." The Journal of American Folklore 114.454 (2001): 447.
The author maintains that Macpherson's putting Ossian in "English dress" has the effect of removing "...the graphic edge of truly ancient Gaelic songs. He draws on first hand experience of them, but skillfully emphasizes elements that would appeal to a non-Gaelic audience. In so doing, incidentally, he contributed to the foundations of mist-laden Celticism exploited so fully by Yeats and his contemporaries, and latterly by today's music industry in the marketing of misrepresented 'Celtic' music."
Thomas M. Curley argues from another position, that Macpherson ought to be appreciated as the original poet that he was: "Overestimating Macpherson's indebtedness to genuine Gaelic literature not only misstates the case seriously but also robs him of the distinction of authorship...Giving Macpherson his due, by telling the whole truth about Ossian and taking the bitter with the better, would make him more than a bard standing on the shoulders of predecessors merely reworking Fenian conventions. He would emerge more or less as a self-created genius of self-invented myth whose enduring inspiration for Romantics is a matter of historical record." (Curley, Thomas M. Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. 18.)