Although Johnson admitted he understood nothing about Scottish Gaelic, he reported what he had been told about it: "Of the Earse language, as I understand nothing, I cannot say more than I have been told. It is the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood". He thus popularized the misconception that the Gaels had no written literature going as far as reporting "that the Earse never was a written language; that there is not in the world an Earse manuscript a hundred years old; and that the sounds of the highlanders were never expressed by letters, till some little books of piety were translated, and a metrical version of the Psalms was made by the Synod of Argyle."