* The long history of Anglo-Saxon denigration of the Celtic Irish race inspired pro-Celtic nationalists to turn the cultural tables. The Scots, unlike the Irish, had not lacked apologists. In the 1760s the Scottish poet James MacPherson (1736–96) published the Poems of Ossian, which he claimed to be the work of Ossian, a third-century Celtic bard. MacPherson professed to have discovered and translated this ancient work, but when Samuel Johnson challenged its authenticity, MacPherson could not produce his originals. Poems of Ossian is now considered one of British literature’s greatest frauds. Robert Burns (1759–96), in contrast, remains Scotland’s national poet. Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786, the first of a spate of well-loved and enduring works in dialect. Although Walter Scott (1771–1832) is now better known for the Saxon-Norman racial thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of his 1819 novel Ivanhoe, his publishing career began in 1802–03 with a collection of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and carried on with a series of novels and poems set in Scotland.