Herman Melville on Napoleon’s love for Ossian
Context: Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), and later combined under the title The Poems of Ossian.
“I am rejoiced to see Hazlitt speak for Ossian. There is nothing more contemptable in that contemptable man (tho' good poet, in his department) Wordsworth, than his contempt for Ossian. And nothing that more raises my idea of Napoleon than his great admiration for him.—The loneliness of the spirit of Ossian harmonized with the loneliness of the greatness of Napoleon.”
Melville wrote this around 1862 in the margins of his copy of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers and Lectures on the English Poets
Source: Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography - Volume 2, p. 436