Writing in the Preface to his 1773 translation of The Iliad, James Macpherson captured many of his ideas about the past, the use of sources, issues of authenticity, causation, poetry and translation. This is a snapshot of his thinking in the early 1770s, but echoes more clearly his practice as a poet, translator, editor, compiler and historian during the previous decade or so. In The Highlander (1758) and the Ossianic Collections (1760–73), Macpherson grapples in these texts with historical source material, translation and authenticity, revealing a tension between his emerging appreciation of the principles of Enlightenment historiography and the proto-Romantic sentimental emphasis on feeling inspired across the world by Ossian in the second half of the eighteenth century. In The Highlander and the Ossianic Collections, Macpherson's writing career begins seemingly as a poet. However, a close examination of the poetry of The Highlander and the paratextual material – the advertisements, prefaces and dissertations – of the Ossianic Collections, reveals that while he wrote in the mode of poetry and its translation, he did so from the perspective of an historian. The key Enlightenment historiographical issues that we identified in the previous chapter – how to reconcile historical narrative with philosophical explanation, while developing an erudite engagement with sources – feature to varying degrees in Macpherson's writings of the late 1750s and early 1760s. In The Highlander, he creates a narrative in verse that was based on historical source material, demonstrating an element of Macpherson's erudition, which he then used to make a Whig constitutional argument about Scotland's place in the British Empire. In the Ossianic Collections, Macpherson adds philosophy to this mix. The prose paratexts to the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Fingal and Temora are self-consciously historiographical, where Macpherson comments on sources, their relationship to concepts of truth and authenticity, causation, the purpose of history and the stadial nature of the past.