I want to know the answer to the following question:
What did translators of this time assume was better than the actual text they were translating?
All the background I'm provided with is that "For scholarship they cared no more than had their predecessors, and they did not shrink from making translations from translations in third languages, or from languages that they hardly knew, or—as in the case of James Macpherson's "translations" of Ossian—from texts that were actually of the "translator's" own composition.". Is that enough to answer the question?
Answer: no