To The Hebrides E-Book

Samuel Johnson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 1637

Beschreibung

Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell's Journal of a Tour To The Hebrides are widely regarded as among the best pieces of travel writing ever produced. Johnson and Boswell spent the autumn of 1773 touring Scotland as far west as the islands of Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, Ulva, Inchkenneth and Iona. Highly readable, often profound, and at times very funny, their accounts of the 'jaunt' are above all a valuable record of a society undergoing rapid change. In this pioneering new edition, Ronald Black brings together the two men's starkly contrasting accounts of each of the thirteen stages of the journey. He also restores to Boswell's text 20,000 words from his journal which were denied entry to his book because they were intimate, defamatory, or about the islands rather than Johnson. The endnotes incorporate Boswell's footnotes, translations of Latin passages, a clear summary of pre-existing information on the two texts, and a fresh focus on what the two men actually found on their trip. To The Hebrides also includes contemporary prints by Thomas Rowlandson, seventeen new maps and a comprehensive index.

Leseprobe

To the Hebrides

Samuel Johnson, a bookseller’s son from Lichfield, achieved fame as a poet and moral essayist before completing his most famous work, The Dictionary of the English Language.James Boswell had known him for exactly ten years when they set out together for the Hebrides in 1773. Son of a Scottish judge and himself a lawyer, Boswell is celebrated as much for the disarming honesty of his diaries as for his great biography of Johnson.

Formerly a lecturer in Celtic in the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, Ronald Black is Gaelic Editor of The Scotsman. As well as various anthologies and studies of eighteenth- and twentieth-century Gaelic verse, he has published The Gaelic Otherworld, a new edition of the folklore collections of the Rev. John Gregorson Campbell of Tiree.

This eBook edition published in 2012 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Notes and maps copyright © Ronald Black 2007, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78027-031-9

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-516-1

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One: The Lowlands

Chapter Two: The Highlands

Chapter Three: Skye

Chapter Four: Raasay

Chapter Five: Skye Again

Chapter Six: Coll

Chapter Seven: Mull

Chapter Eight: Ulva

Chapter Nine: Inchkenneth

Chapter Ten: Iona

Chapter Eleven: Mull Again

Chapter Twelve: Highlands Again

Chapter Thirteen: Lowlands Again

Notes

Boswell’s Conclusion

Books and Articles Cited in the Notes

Abbreviations

Glossary

Index

Maps

The Tour

The Lowlands

Edinburgh

The Highlands

Skye

Raasay

Skye Again

Coll

Mull

Ulva

Inchkenneth

Journey to Iona

Iona

Mull Again

Highlands Again

Lowlands Again

Loch Bracadale

Preface

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell toured Scotland in 1773. Their books about the trip, first published in 1775 and 1785 respectively, are monuments of English literature and of travel writing, but they also stand in line with Kirk, Martin, Burt, Pococke, Pennant, Ramsay and John Lane Buchanan as classics of Highland ethnography, the fountainhead of writings in English about the lives, traditions and beliefs of the Gaelic-speaking people of Scotland. Johnson’s book, like Martin’s and others, has an ‘ethnographic core’ (pp. 178–210 below) in which travelogue is laid aside in favour of general observations on the people’s way of life.

Johnson was an Englishman who lived from 1709 to 1784. Boswell was a Lowland Scot who lived from 1740 to 1795. Beyond that there is no need to introduce our two travellers. At pp. 20–22 and 39 Boswell does it for us, and he was so satisfied with his description of Johnson that he used it again in his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), which is rightly regarded as the best biography in the English language.

To the Hebrides looks different from any previous edition of the Journey or the Tour. But that is what it is – a new edition of these two classics. It is all here, but organised in three new ways.

Firstly, Johnson’s subtitles, like ‘Fall of Fiers’ and ‘Lough Ness’, have been dispensed with; they were unhelpful anyway. Other than this, his text is as published in 1775.

Secondly, instead of presenting the whole of Johnson followed by the whole of Boswell, we have divided the material into thirteen chapters and a conclusion, thus bringing together what the two men have to say about each of the thirteen legs of the journey and highlighting their differing perspectives. This throws up intriguing differences on matters of detail – the circumstances of their arrival in Ulva, for example. Our travellers were of an age to be grandfather and grandson, and it shows.

Thirdly, thanks to the discovery of Boswell’s original journal at Malahide in 1930, Frederick Pottle and Charles Bennett were able to publish Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1936), which contained an enormous amount of previously unknown material of all kinds. This book (here referred to as the Journal as opposed to the Tour) was so successful that Pottle produced an expanded edition in 1963 containing corrections and additions to the text and a splendid ‘Topographical Supplement’ – the intelligent tourist’s dream. Until now, the Journal has never been printed between the same covers as Johnson’s Journey.

In refocusing Johnson’s and Boswell’s books on the Hebrides, Hugh Andrew of Birlinn felt that a composite text of the Tour and the Journal was required. Gordon Turnbull of Yale University (the owners of the manuscript) readily agreed, pointing out that this very idea had been prefigured by Pottle, who wrote in 1963 of the respective merits of the Tour and the Journal:

Careful students of Boswell have found unique values in each version, and would probably prefer to either a text made by selecting at will from manuscript journal and printed book. Those who on the whole prefer the book would certainly like to restore from the manuscript a good many passages that Boswell in printing struck out merely because they transgressed his own very liberal standards of prudence and decorum.

The bedrock for our Boswell text is the journal as edited by Pottle and Bennett, including Pottle’s corrections and additions. That is what I mean in my notes where I refer to ‘the journal’. Where the Tour adds anything of substance, it too is incorporated. This was done by Pottle and Bennett in any case wherever the manuscript was deficient. I have modernised the orthography of these additions in line with the conventions established by Pottle and Bennett. I have also paragraphed Boswell’s text afresh to aid readability. Where the Tour contains information which adds something to our knowledge or understanding but which would disturb the flow of the text, it is given in the endnotes.

Johnson, striving for forthrightness, wrote no footnotes, but Boswell added many to the Tour. These will be found here in the endnotes, clearly marked, as will translations of the Latin texts which have kindly been made for us by Mr Norman MacLeod.

In the course of 230 years the Journey and Tour have reappeared frequently in two different formats. I would call them ‘landmark’ and ‘essay’ editions. By an ‘essay edition’ I mean a redaction of one or both of the texts prefaced by an introductory essay; all such editions are of great value as the response of an individual to a classic work. The landmark editions have added materially to our knowledge in points of detail, and to them my debt is enormous. I have already mentioned Pottle and Bennett’s; a century earlier there appeared Croker’s 1831 edition of the Life, which included the Tour, annotated by Sir Walter Scott. It went through so many mutations that I have felt it best to refer to it in the endnotes by day rather than page. Then there was Robert Carruthers’s edition of the Tour (1852). Though not a Gaelic speaker, Carruthers was editor of The Inverness Courier, and this provided him with a rich store of Highland insight and anecdote. In 1887 Croker’s combined edition of the Life and Tour was succeeded by George Birkbeck Hill’s; this was revised and further enlarged by L. F. Powell in 1934 and 1964. The result is an indispensible work in six volumes, one of which – the fifth – consists of Boswell’s Tour and Johnson’s journal of a visit to Wales in 1774. Finally there is Fleeman’s 1985 edition of the Journey, which contains a valuable ‘Chronology and Topography’ section that expands and updates Pottle’s topographical supplement.

The principal aim of To the Hebrides is to summarise existing information on the two texts as clearly as possible. However, the Gaelic and Highland perspective inevitably brings fresh insights. There is also serendipity. Earlier this year my old friend Nicholas Maclean-Bristol of Breacachadh Castle in Coll rang me up in delighted mood to tell me that he had just acquired a good many of the documents described by Boswell at pp. 326–32. They had been lost since 1897 but turned up last year in South Africa. Clearly this is a footnote to The Treasure of Auchinleck, and the story was duly reported in the West Highland Free Press (27 April 2007) under the headline ‘The Treasure of Port Elizabeth’.

To the Hebrides has been planned as the first of two publications from Birlinn on Johnson and Boswell. Hugh Andrew has also asked me to prepare To the Western Islands, in which the Highland response to Johnson will be examined, mainly through the Rev. Donald MacNicol’s Remarks on Dr Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Hebrides (1779), a much maligned book that is ripe for reappraisal.

My grateful thanks are due to Gordon Turnbull and the Editorial Committee of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell; to Norman MacLeod, Walkerburn; to the staffs of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh University Library and the Edinburgh Central Library; to Richard Cox, Roger Hutchinson, Jean Jones, Sheila Kidd, Anne Loughran, Mairi MacArthur, Dr John MacInnes, Rebecca MacKay, Catrìona Mackie, Nicholas Maclean-Bristol, Colm Ó Baoill and Lorna Pike; and, last but never least, to my wife Máire for the pains she has taken with design, typesetting and maps. I hope our text is free of the gremlins that have beset previous editions, such as the one in which Boswell speaks of the loo that he and Johnson ‘fought for in vain’ at Raasay House. See note 364 . . .

Ronald Black, Peebles, 2 May 2007

Introduction

“The sea was smooth.” So begins a paragraph of Dr Johnson’s at p. 176 below. Then, just four pages later, another begins: “When their grain is arrived at the state which they must consider as ripeness, they do not cut, but pull the barley: to the oats they apply the sickle.”

This, to me, sums up the fascination of the present work, although I could have chosen countless other examples from Johnson’s writing, Boswell’s, or both. It could be described as the juxtaposition of specific experience (the sea on a given day) and of general reflection (Highland agriculture). Or, conversely, as the juxtaposition of the universal (smooth seas are timeless and within most people’s personal experience) and of the specific (Highland agricultural methods in the 1770s). Or, of course, as the juxtaposition of that which was experienced and that which was merely observed – the subjective and the objective.

However the trick is analysed, it is good travel writing. A smooth sea is experienced on a particular day; the pulling up of barley by the roots is placed on record. The reader learns much about everyday life in the eighteenth-century Highlands, and the method is the pleasant one of being allowed to feel that he has joined the great writer on his journey of discovery.

Of course some one actually did join the great writer on his journey of discovery. Not only did Boswell accompany Johnson, he was the glue that held the ‘jaunt’ together, arranging, chivvying, buttering-up, filling in awkward gaps in the conversation, taking notes, apologising, and sometimes, yes, finding it all a little too much, and becoming what a journalist is never supposed to become. The story.

Boswell was a good travel-writer in all the little ways that Johnson was not. He was a ‘sea was smooth’ man rather than a ‘barley was pulled up by the roots’ man: not an objective ethnologist but a lively, subjective and percipient recorder of the immediate and transient facts of the trip. Boswell is the honestest and most celebrated diarist of the eighteenth century. The function he performs for Johnson is that performed by a camera crew on a modern expedition. For those of us whose primary interest is in what Johnson was actually seeking to tell us, and in how closely his observations approximate to the truth, Boswell provides verification, back-up, documentary evidence, names, dates, places. Had those other giants of Highland ethnography whom I listed four years ago at p. vii (Robert Kirk, Martin Martin, Edmund Burt, Richard Pococke, Thomas Pennant, John Ramsay, John Lane Buchanan) had their Boswell, our data and our understanding would be infinitely the richer, because our biographical knowledge of some of these men is rudimentary in the extreme.

If asked to name the highlights of Johnson’s and Boswell’s work, most commentators would probably point to Johnson’s ‘ethnographic core’ of general information in Chapter 5 – which includes, incidentally, his perceptive disquisition on the crucial role played in Highland society by the tacksmen – and to the two men’s complementary accounts of the house on Loch Ness-side in Chapter 2. Boswell’s account of New Year customs in Chapter 6 (pp. 318–19) also deserves honourable mention, not least because it has only now been restored from his journal (by which I mean Pottle and Bennett’s 1963 edition of the journal, as is made clear at p. viii).

That is Highland ethnography as narrowly defined, comprising writings about ‘the lives, traditions and beliefs of the Gaelic-speaking people of Scotland’ (p. vii). Around its outer edges, ethnography expands to embrace aspects of history, archaeology and the description of living individuals. One of the reasons why Boswell’s contribution to Chapter 5 is even larger than Johnson’s is that he includes in it as much as he could glean of the wanderings of Prince Charles in Skye and Raasay in 1746, and other Jacobite matters (pp. 216–29). His account of Coll’s charter-chest, or rather cabinet, at pp. 326–32 is of great historical interest; it is, for example, virtually our only source of information about the Coll company of the Argyll Militia in 1745–46.

Everywhere they went, the two men took note of whatever antiquities were to be found and of their associated folklore. There are some startling differences, and some startling similarities, between what was to be found in 1773 and what attracts visitors today. No modern guide to Skye, for example, would devote as much space as Boswell does to the annaid or early Christian settlement at Bay (pp. 241–42); but then, he was misled into believing that it was a temple of the goddess Anaitis, and therefore of global significance. Together, Boswell and Johnson add much to our knowledge of the state of Iona’s buildings in 1773, but their descriptions are not as scientific as those of Pennant, who had visited the island the year before, and our heroes’ combined contribution to archaeology may ultimately lie in Johnson’s remark (p. 381): “That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona!”

The individuals portrayed by Johnson and Boswell leap off the pages with as much vividness as they possessed in 1773. Sir Alexander Macdonald (Chapter 3) fails spectacularly to live up to the model of a Highland chief. This is hardly surprising, given that for generations the Macdonalds have been following the old Campbell example of finding wives for their sons amongst the Lowland aristocracy. Sir Alexander shows the process brought one step further, for he was educated at Eton. The Rev. Donald MacQueen (Chapter 5) is highly regarded by Johnson for the opposite reason. Johnson has no tolerance of Presbyterianism but knows the history of Scotland in the seventeenth century, and expected Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian ministers to be idle placemen or raving shamans. In MacQueen he is bemused to find a measure of general learning, an interest in the classics, and a total disbelief in second sight which leaves the Englishman looking distinctly more superstitious than the Highlander. Flora MacDonald (also Chapter 5), the Jacobite heroine of heroines, now aged fifty-one, is described by Boswell as ‘a little woman, of a mild and genteel appearance, mighty soft and well-bred’. Another of Prince Charles’s guides in 1746, Malcolm MacLeod of Brae (Chapter 4), ‘went to London to be hanged, and returned in a post-chaise with Miss Flora Macdonald’. He enjoys defying the laws against the Highland dress, and dances a reel with Boswell on the top of Dun Caan. Mrs MacKinnon of Coirechatachan, a mother of nine who remains young in spirit, welcomes our travellers twice (Chapters 3 and 5), speaks freely of her dreams, and gets on so famously with Johnson that she declares at table: “I’m in love with him. What is it to live and not love?” The laird of Coll’s son (Chapter 6), aged twenty-three, seems simultaneously devoid of pretension, learning, superstition and traditional knowledge, and comes across not merely as a post-Culloden islander but as an almost twenty-first-century one: he has an amiable disposition, loves boats and horses, treats all men equally, understands psychology and is keen to find new ways of making the land yield a profit.

Also worthy of mention, by way of painting further contrasts in character, are the MacLean chiefs of Duart (Chapter 9) and of Lochbuie (Chapter 11). Duart’s ancestors lost their castles and lands to the Campbells a hundred years before; now, having seen service in the army in America, he is living quietly with his daughters and servants in a couple of thatched houses on an islet which should have been his, but which he has rented from the duke of Argyll (whom we meet in the flesh in Chapter 12). Duart (or rather Sir Allan) is patiently awaiting the result of court proceedings against the duke, and Boswell is one of his counsel. Boswell treats us to some delightfully unlawyerly sentiments. He is ‘agreeably disappointed’ in Sir Allan, he says, because he turns out to be a religious man, and although he swears like a soldier he does not drink like one. When Boswell goes to Iona (Chapter 10) he kneels on holy ground and swears ‘that I will stand by Sir Allan Maclean and his family’. Finally, John Maclaine of Lochbuie (Chapter 11) is a rascally chief of the old school who indulges freely in litigation, not because he has lost his lands but because he enjoys it as others enjoy drink, cards or women. He is known to have put men in a dungeon, and he barks, or rather bawls, at Johnson: “Are you of the Johnstons of Glencoe or of Ardnamurchan?”

Samuel Johnson was neither of Glencoe nor of Ardnamurchan. He was born at Lichfield on 18 September 1709, the son of a local bookseller, and was brought to London at the age of three to be touched for scrofula (the king’s evil) by Queen Anne. The disease appears to have left him permanently blind in one eye. He remarks at Dunvegan (p. 238): “I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober.” When Lady MacLeod expresses surprise that he should admit it, Boswell says: “Madam, he knows that with that madness he is superior to other men.”

Johnson was educated at Lichfield Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he spent fourteen months in 1728–29 without taking a degree. Here he learned the art of disputation, and discovered that the best weapon he possessed was his brain. Boswell speaks (p. 20) of his habit of ‘talking for victory’, and gives (p. 56) a good example of his disputatious nature: in dicussion with Lord Monboddo on the relative merits of the savage and the London shopkeeper, Johnson naturally championed the latter, but confessed afterwards to Boswell that ‘he did not know but he might have taken the side of the savage equally, had anybody else taken the side of the shopkeeper’. There is another very revealing anecdote at p. 371. Dr Johnson once called on the historian Dr John Campbell (who, incidentally, was a grandson of the perpetrator of the Massacre of Glencoe, Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, but who had lived in England since the age of five). Campbell made some remark about Tull’s Husbandry, Johnson began to dispute it, and Campbell said, “Come, we do not want to get the better of one another. We want to increase each other’s ideas.” Boswell concludes: “Mr Johnson took it in good part, and the conversation then went on coolly and instructively. His candour in relating this anecdote does him much credit, and his conduct on that occasion proves how easily he could be persuaded to talk from a better motive than ‘for victory’.”

Johnson’s father died in 1731, leaving his family in poverty, and he tried for a while to scrape a living by writing essays for the Birmingham Journal. In 1735 he married a widow twenty years older than himself, Mrs Elizabeth Porter, and started a private school near Lichfield. The school failed, and the marriage was childless. In 1737, in the company of one of his pupils, David Garrick, he went to London, which remained his home for the rest of his life. Garrick went on to achieve fame as an actor, while the printer Edward Cave gave Johnson a job on The Gentleman’s Magazine, writing poems and verses in English and Latin, essays, biographies and political discourses. This at last was a solid platform for his career as a writer and lexicographer. London: a Poem appeared in 1738, the Life of Mr. Richard Savage in 1744, and The Vanity of Human Wishes in 1749, two years after he began work on his dictionary. In 1750 he launched The Rambler, a twice-weekly periodical consisting of essays on all subjects imaginable, written almost entirely by himself. It ceased publication in 1752, the year of his wife’s death, but he continued to contribute to other journals.

The first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755. It is, beyond all others, the work by which he is remembered today, though the Lives of the Poets and the Journey to the Western Islands run it close, and it is now impossible not to view Johnson’s works through the prism of Boswell’s. He did not produce the dictionary single-handed. He had a team of six assistants, five of whom were Scots, the senior being Alexander Macbean, a Gaelic speaker – in 1777 he examined the Rev. William Shaw’s manuscript ‘Analysis of the Galic Language’ on behalf of Johnson, who referred to him as ‘a very learned Highlander, Macbean’. His younger brother was also on the team, which makes two Gaelic speakers out of six (or seven, if we include Johnson). The Dictionary was more than an indispensable work of reference, and more than a means of stabilising the orthography of the English language, for the entrepreneurial, ‘bottom-up’ manner in which it had been undertaken was truly inspirational. I can cite only one example of this inspiration, but no doubt there are others. Sometime in the late 1760s seven Highland gentlemen formed a society with the object of compiling a Gaelic dictionary. They shared out the letters of the alphabet and made good progress. But when in 1775 they read the injudicious remarks which appear at pp. 207–10 below, the project collapsed into a welter of satirical Gaelic songs aimed at their erstwhile hero, and the publication that emerged in 1779 from the study of the member entrusted with the letters M, N and O, far from being a dictionary, was the Rev. Donald MacNicol’s Remarks on Dr Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Hebrides.

At the age of forty-six, Johnson had become the Ursa Major of the intellectual firmament. His next great project after 1755 was an edition of Shakespeare, but, characteristically, he scribbled and boomed all the way to its publication ten years later – editing the Literary Magazine for a while, throwing off more biographies, contributing his ‘Idler’ essays to the Universal Chronicle, and publishing his only novel, Rasselas. In 1762 he was granted a pension of £300 a year by Lord Bute, in 1763 Boswell made his acquaintance, and in 1764 ‘The Club’, later ‘The Literary Club’, was founded (See here). Its original members included Johnson, Reynolds, Burke and Goldsmith; to these Garrick, Fox and Boswell were soon added. All of these individuals, and countless others, are listed and characterised (‘portrait-painter’, ‘statesman’, ‘poet and dramatist’ or whatever) in the index below.

It was in 1764, also, that Johnson first met the Thrales, and so, gradually, laid down the more relaxed pattern of living that marked the last two decades of his existence. Henry Thrale was a wealthy brewer, the son of a wealthy brewer, who lived on a country estate at Streatham; he was married to a charming Welshwoman, Hester Salusbury, then aged only twenty-three, who had given birth to their first child (‘Queeney’) that same year. It was the kind of family that Johnson had never had, and he became an honorary member of it, revered, adored and tolerated in equal measure. For the next seventeen years, happily in love with Hester and Queeney, he gravitated between his London lodgings and Streatham, sometimes travelling to Oxford, Lichfield and elsewhere.

The journey to the Hebrides was Johnson’s first and greatest venture further afield. It was inspired by his Jacobite inclinations and, as we are told at p. 18, by childhood memories of sitting in his father’s shop reading Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands (which clearly influenced his own choice of title). More immediately, however, the journey was provoked by Boswell’s almost irresistible desire to tempt the great man on to his own turf. Johnson could see that at the age of sixty-four he could hardly explore the world on his own, and that in the absence of hotels and public transport, he had found the perfect travel companion: “Mr Boswell,” he remarks (p. 84), “between his father’s merit and his own, is sure of reception wherever he comes.” Journeys to Wales and France followed in 1774 and 1775 respectively, but these were in the company of the Thrales, and, as John Wain has pointed out (Samuel Johnson, pp. 341–42), “Travelling with the rich, while it undeniably has its points, never permits much involvement with the everyday life of the country. Johnson never entered an ordinary Welsh home, let alone an ordinary French home, in the way that in Scotland he entered the cottages of crofters and the cabins of trading vessels and the bedrooms of low-raftered inns. Undoubtedly an opportunity was missed. One would have given a good deal to know his reactions, in each country, to the people, his observation of their life, his judgement of their hopes and fears. But, insulated in comfort, surrounded by a thicket of servants, he saw these things as in a tapestry.”

It is unsurprising, then, that there is no real Welsh or French equivalent of Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, although some of his journals of these trips survived to be published posthumously. Aside from the Journey (1775), Johnson’s output in the years of his ‘retirement’ consisted of The Lives of the Poets (1779–81) and a variety of poems, sermons, prayers, meditations and political pamphlets, of which last a couple, The False Alarm (1770) and Taxation no Tyranny (1775), are mentioned by Boswell below (pp. 107, 463). Johnson died in 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. He had twice been awarded the degree of LLD – by Trinity College, Dublin, in 1765, and by his own university, Oxford, in 1775 (see note 70).

During his lifetime and ever since, not least in Scotland, Johnson has been the object of dislike, misunderstanding and ridicule; to these, during his lifetime only, we should add fear. Some of the reasons for it all are apparent in To the Hebrides. For one thing, his style owed not a little to the Latin language. At its best, as in the ‘tacksman’ disquisition at p. 185, it is simple, clear and dignified. At its worst it is as impenetrable as an obelisk which one may walk around without finding lock or key, as at p. 175: “If love of ease surmounted our desire of knowledge, the offence has not the invidiousness of singularity.” Between these two extremes are good things and bad. He could be pedantic, as when he objected to Boswell’s remark that a mountain was ‘like a cone’ (p. 112); he could write a perfect tableau, as at p. 84: “Once we saw a cornfield, in which a lady was walking with some gentlemen.”

Johnson was always uncompromisingly himself. Unfortunately, in addition to being combative, himself was a heap of contradictions, with a dose of self-loathing thrown in. Boswell remarks at p. 314 that he ‘regretted that Mr Johnson did not practise the art of accommodating himself to different sorts of people’. As a result, he was likely to receive a bad press wherever he went, leaving Boswell to pick up the pieces, as at p. 46 where the latter is forced to remark: “And here I must do Dr Johnson the justice to contradict a very absurd and ill-natured story as to what passed at St Andrews . . .”

Johnson was an Anglican, a Tory and a Jacobite, in that order. His political, religious, philosophical, social and literary views were strongly hierarchical. He visualised all good as coming from ‘above’, all evil from ‘below’. He had no time for democratic institutions or for individuals such as Rousseau, Macpherson and Monboddo who promoted the ideal of the ‘noble savage’. At p. 93 he declares that ‘as government advances towards perfection, provincial judicature is perhaps in every empire gradually abolished’, at p. 80 that ‘politeness, the natural product of royal government, is diffused from the laird through the whole clan’, and at p. 208 that ‘there can be no polished language without books’. All of these statements are inherently contentious, or contain contentious elements. To Johnson, all the world was a debate, and he sought to occupy a particular piece of ground, to plant his standard upon it, and to hold it against all opposition. In many types of company this could appear graceless, and Boswell takes pains to broaden and soften the overall picture. At p. 102 he describes how, at Fort George, Sir Eyre Coote, who has travelled through the deserts of Arabia, praises the Arabs, ‘their fidelity if they undertook to conduct you: that they’d lose their lives rather than let you be robbed’. It is a moment for listening and for admiration, but Johnson spoils it by saying that there is ‘no superior virtue in this’, clearly meaning that a breach of the eighth commandment should not be allowed to escalate into a breach of the sixth; Boswell glosses the remark by explaining that Johnson ‘is always for maintaining the superiority of civilized men over uncivilized’, which means in this case the superiority of Christian over Moslem. And at p. 113, as the pair ride down through Glen Shiel, Boswell gives us an insight into the nature of Johnson’s ideal hierarchy, a benign autocracy: “Mr Johnson was much refreshed by this repast. He was pleased when I told him he would make a good chief. He said if he were one, he would dress his servants better than himself, and knock a fellow down if he looked saucy to a Macdonald in rags. But he would not treat men as brutes. He would let them know why all of his clan were to have attention paid to them. He would tell his upper servants why, and make them tell the others.”

None of this entirely explains why Johnson should have been feared, but that ‘fear’ is the correct word is clearly demonstrated by the behaviour of the professors of Aberdeen and Glasgow (pp. 62, 432). It is explained, I think, by a letter from the Rev. Andrew Gallie to Charles Macintosh of the Highland Society of Scotland, published in Henry Mackenzie’s Ossian Committee Report of 1805. The question at stake was why the Rev. Donald MacQueen had so dismally failed to convey to Dr Johnson some of the most basic facts about the Gaelic language, its antiquity, its manuscripts, its printed books and its literature, with particular reference to the wealth of Ossianic ballads and tales which were such an everyday feature of life in almost every house which the two travellers had passed from Nairn in the north to Luss in the south. Gallie wrote: “Dr Macqueen will be forgiven by many for his caution, because he saw – perhaps experienced – so much of Johnson that he might dread contradiction or opposition from him would be as running his head into the lion’s mouth. I think I can recollect, that gentlemen very high in the literary circle, and most intimate with Johnson, often left the cause of truth and the field of contest to him, knowing the power and virulence of his sarcasms to be such, as would irritate beyond measure, and which he seldom restrained when opposed.”

In fact, although not the ideal man for the job, MacQueen had done his best. Boswell notes at p. 137 that he (MacQueen) ‘told Mr Johnson that there was an Erse Bible; that he had compared the new Erse Testament by Mr Stuart with the former one; that there were many Erse manuscripts – all of which circumstances we afterwards found not to be true’. It is not clear to me in what way any of these statements could be regarded as untrue. The language then generally referred to by non-Gaelic speakers as ‘Erse’ and by Gaelic speakers as ‘the Highland language’, and to almost all of us nowadays as ‘Scottish Gaelic’ or ‘Gaelic’ (Gàidhlig), is a few degrees removed from Irish, just as, say, Portuguese is from Spanish, or Dutch from German. The Bible, New Testament and manuscripts to which MacQueen was referring were all one, two or three degrees removed from Irish. If that meant that they were not in a language distinct from Irish, then spoken Gaelic was itself not a language distinct from Irish. A ‘language’ has been waggishly defined as ‘a dialect with an army and a navy’, though how this definition works for eighteenth-century Ireland and the Highlands is beyond me, except that I would point out that the Highlands had an army in 1745–46. If the ‘third degree of removal’ is defined as the establishment of a new, distinct and secure orthography, that stage had been reached by Scottish Gaelic in 1767, the date of publication of the above-mentioned ‘new Erse Testament’. Extraordinarily, as is explained in note 279 on p. 491, Johnson himself had intervened at a crucial stage to make sure that this New Testament was published, because, as he says himself (p. 124), ‘there were lately some who thought it reasonable to refuse them a version of the holy scriptures, that they might have no monument of their mother-tongue’.

The problem for Johnson was not the scriptures but Ossian’s poems, concerning which he was locked into a bitter dispute with James Macpherson, whom he cordially loathed. General Norman MacLeod of MacLeod, who was just nineteen years old when our two travellers stayed with him and his family at Dunvegan, later recalled that Johnson’s ‘principal design was to find proofs of the unauthenticity of Ossian’s poems and in his enquiries it became very soon evident that he wished not to find them genuine’ (Grant, The MacLeods, p. 503). There is no doubt but that, after the inspiration of Martin Martin and the encouragement of James Boswell, the prospect of finding proof of the unauthenticity of Macpherson’s ‘translations’ on his own turf had provided Johnson with a third good reason for coming. Unfortunately this part of the enterprise went badly wrong. The Highland people were loyal to Macpherson. They knew what a translation was – basic communication in one language rendered into basic communication in another, which most bilinguals could manage, more or less; or flowery speech in one language rendered into flowery speech in another, which most people regarded as neither feasible nor desirable. For generations it has been a truism that Gaelic songs ‘cannot be translated’. I have heard this statement so often, and read it so many times in Gaelic books and magazines, even in reviews of translations of Gaelic songs, that I have almost begun to believe it myself. What it boils down to, I suppose, is that even if you have a hundred different translations of a creative work, none of them will ever be as good as the original. But it was difficult for Johnson to find anyone who understood both Gaelic and English and was willing to deny that Macpherson’s work was a ‘translation’.

Johnson encountered the problem in Raasay in the delectable shape of Miss Flora Macleod, and this gives me an opportunity to compare his account of the incident as published in 1775 with a letter written to Hester Thrale just a couple of weeks after the night in question. On 24 September 1773, at Talisker, Johnson reported to Mrs Thrale (Redford, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2, p. 84):

After supper a young Lady who was visiting, sung Earse songs, in which Lady Raarsa joined prettily enough, but not gracefully, the young Ladies sustained the chorus better. They are very little used to be asked questions, and not well prepared with answers. When one of the Songs was over, I asked the princess that sat next me, what is it about? I question, if she conceived that I did not understand it. For the entertainment of the company, said she. But, Madam, what is the meaning of it? It is a love song. This was all the intelligence that I could obtain, nor have I ever been able to procure a translation of a line of Erse.

But at p. 143 below we read:

After supper the ladies sung Erse songs, to which I listened as an English audience to an Italian opera, delighted with the sound of words which I did not understand.

I inquired the subjects of the songs, and was told of one, that it was a love song, and of another, that it was a farewell composed by one of the Islanders that was going, in this epidemical fury of emigration, to seek his fortune in America. What sentiments would rise, on such an occasion, in the heart of one who had not been taught to lament by precedent, I should gladly have known; but the lady, by whom I sat, thought herself not equal to the work of translating.

Johnson wrote substantial letters to Mrs Thrale once or twice a week throughout the tour, with the exception of 30 September to 15 October, when he was stormbound in Coll. These letters are written in a style noticeably lighter than that of the Journey, and deserve to be published as an addendum to it, for they contain much of interest.

Johnson’s desire to procure translations of ‘Erse verse’ was partially fulfilled at Erray in Mull when he met Christina MacLean (pp. 208, 345, 356, 358–59). On the face of it, it is a little curious that neither he nor Boswell reports any attempt to persuade any of their hosts to set up a performance of Ossianic ballads in the company of a competent translator, and MacLeod of MacLeod’s suspicion that Johnson had come to Skye ‘to find proofs of the unauthenticity of Ossian’s poems’ seems to be well founded. When a test was made, it was not at Dunvegan but at Ullinish, proposed by the host’s son Rorie MacLeod and carried out by himself and MacQueen in the presence not of Johnson but of Boswell (p. 261). When the result was reported to Johnson, he immediately stated a conclusion which was entirely correct with regard to Macpherson’s ‘translations’, but begged the question with regard to ‘Ossian’s poems’ in the original: “He has found names, and stories, and phrases – nay passages in old songs – and with them has compounded his own compositions, and so made what he gives to the world as the translation of an ancient poem.”

It speaks ill of Johnson that he admitted the existence of ‘old songs’ of this kind, but sought not to hear them, refused to believe in the existence of manuscripts that contained them, denied their antiquity, and comprehensively insulted the language in which they were sung. He had carried ‘talking for victory’ against James Macpherson down to the level of the grotesque, and if this was one of the purposes of his visit, it was a charade.

What then of James Boswell? In 1773 he was a rather reluctant thirty-two-year-old member of the Faculty of Advocates. Born in Edinburgh on 29 October 1740, eldest son of the circuit judge Lord Auchinleck, he was a difficult child, and was educated successively at Edinburgh High School, at home, and at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. He was quick to discover the joys of sex, the stage and the Catholic Church, all of which were sternly disapproved of, and at the age of nineteen he ran away to London, where he naturally fell into bad company but was rescued by his father’s connections (see here). He had grand ideas of becoming a soldier, a writer or a politician, or, grander still, of meeting his father’s approval. He therefore agreed to come back home, face the music and sit his examination in Civil Law.

In 1762 Boswell went to London once again, this time with his father’s blessing, to seek a commission in the Guards. Like almost everything he ever undertook, the visit had unintended consequences: he failed in his prime purpose, but met Samuel Johnson, and finally agreed with his father (by letter) to pursue his law studies at Utrecht in Holland. The result was a grand tour of swashbuckling proportions. When he had completed his courses in the summer of 1764 he set off for Berlin in a coach and four with the Earl Marischal, who had taken part in the ’15 and the ’19 on the Jacobite side and was now a courtier of Frederick the Great.

In Switzerland Boswell sought out – and interviewed – both Voltaire and Rousseau. He travelled exhaustively in Italy (see note 108 on p. 469), then crossed to Corsica, which was in armed revolt against the Genoese Republic. He met and befriended the rebel leader, Pasquale Paoli (who was to end his life in exile in London), and made his cause his own. Following his return via France early in 1766 he wrote An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli. On its publication in 1768 it earned him high acclaim and the nickname ‘Corsica Boswell’ (or, more curiously, ‘Paoli’, as at p. 100 below).

In summer 1766 Boswell ‘passed advocate’, and on 25 November 1769 he married his cousin Margaret Montgomerie. Business was good, domestic life was happy and regularly blessed with children, but despite all his resolutions his whoring resumed, as did his drinking, his gaming and his periodic fits of depression (an affliction also suffered by Johnson). He visited London twice between his marriage and the tour to the Islands, in the spring of 1772 and 1773, for what stimulated him most was the company of men of genius, and he had become an inveterate note-taker. Bennet Langton once declared with impatience that ‘Boswell’s conversation consists entirely in asking questions, and it is extremely offensive’ (Robert Lynd, Dr. Johnson & Company, p. 36). He could certainly ask questions ‘slapdash’, as he puts it himself at p. 337 below, but in general he had a highly engaging manner. Where Johnson ‘talked for victory’, he claimed, he himself ‘talked at random’ (Lynd, p. 30). Had he lived 200 years later, he would have enjoyed a successful career in television. Politicians, writers, philosophers and stars of stage and screen would have queued up to appear on his show. He would have bedded the prettiest ones, as he did Rousseau’s mistress and many others of her kind. He would have travelled far and wide, reporting wars, investigating famines, interviewing world leaders and exposing corruption with fearless impartiality. His chief characteristic, as later remembered, was his tendency to provoke mirth (Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh, pp. 60–61): “It was impossible to look in his face without being moved by the comicality which always reigned upon it.” We need seek no further than the following pages, however, for evidence of Boswell’s character. At p. 53 Johnson tells him that ‘Burke says that you have so much good humour naturally, it is scarce a virtue’, thus likening this quality to a language acquired without conscious study. At p. 202 Johnson informs us gravely that in Skye ‘Mr Boswell’s frankness and gaiety made every body communicative’. At p. 214 Boswell cheerfully agrees with him, mentioning another man of genius while he is at it: “My facility of manners, as Adam Smith said of me, had fine play.” At p. 343 Johnson tells him to his face that he is ‘longer a boy than others’, and at p. 394 it is confirmed: “I had a serious joy in hearing my voice,” says Boswell, “resounding in the ancient cathedral of Icolmkill.”

Boswell’s life after the tour may be briefly summarised. He succeeded to his father’s estate in 1782, saw Johnson for the last time in June 1784, read of his death six months later, made up his mind to move to London, published the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (with Edmond Malone’s help) in 1785, and qualified as a barrister in 1786. From now on, instead of living with his wife and five children in Edinburgh and Auchinleck and making periodic visits to London, he lived with them in London and brought them on periodic visits to Edinburgh and Auchinleck. He did not prosper at the English bar, and spent increasing amounts of time working with Malone on his Life of Johnson. Margaret died in 1789, and the Life was published in 1791 to enormous critical acclaim, knocking rival biographies by Hester Thrale (1786) and Sir John Hawkins (1787) completely out of the water. Boswell did not include the tour in the Life, but described the itinerary in a few words and referred his readers to the Journal.

Although Boswell died in 1795, prematurely aged, I cannot resist making special mention of an incident in 1792 which shows him putting his fame to good use in a decent and altruistic way. A young woman from Cornwall called Mary Bryant, who had been sentenced to transportation for street-robbery and stealing a cloak, had escaped from Botany Bay with four men and succeeded in sailing a small boat with them all the way to Timor. They were brought back in irons to England. Boswell interested himself in their case, and set about obtaining an interview with the Home Secretary, a royal pardon for Bryant, and the release of the men from Newgate, in most of which he was successful. The story was filmed for television in 2006 as The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant, starring Romola Garai. How Boswell would have loved it.

I do not apologise for the decision made by Hugh Andrew and myself to place Johnson and Boswell cheek by jowl in each of thirteen different locations. The arrangement of To the Hebrides provides those interested in specific islands with ready access to what they want to know. It also helps throw up fresh insights, comparable to the contrasts between Wheeler and Spon referred to by Johnson himself at p. 379. At pp. 360–61, for example, we discover that on the night of 16 October, according to Boswell, Captain McClure was absent from his ship in the Sound of Ulva, but that ‘his men obligingly came with their long-boat and ferried us over’, while Johnson – ever hierarchical! – has it that ‘the master saw that we wanted a passage, and with great civility sent us his boat’. No doubt Boswell had it right. There are countless other examples of greater significance, of which the two men’s different treatments of the MacLonichs in Chapter 6 (pp. 303–04, 326–27) is one.

Some of the contrasts between Johnson’s and Boswell’s accounts seem to be racial in origin (English and Scots). Others have more to do with class, Johnson feeling perpetually obliged to fight his corner, while the aristocratic Boswell takes things easy. Others again spring from issues of age and youth, or related matters of taste and governance, such as classical and romantic, hierarchical and democratic. The reader should also beware of differences which are more apparent than real. Johnson based his judgements not on emotion but on rigorous logic; at the same time, he had a tendency to fly to the opposite end of any prevailing argument, producing a see-saw effect. That is why, in two completely different settings – breakfasting in Mackenzie’s inn at Inverness and sailing along in a boat from Ullinish to Fernilea – he erupted into identical ‘fits of railing against the Scots’ (pp. 104, 264). Put very simply, Scotland had been in a bad state before the Union, and had obtained benefits from it. “I am entertained,” says Boswell on the first occasion, “with his copious exaggeration upon that subject. But I am uneasy when people are by who do not know him as well as I do and may be apt to think him narrow-minded. I diverted the subject.”

Our complex of contrasts is best illustrated by scenery. Johnson’s Augustan idea of a beautiful landscape was of a fertile and productive one. This can be found in Boswell, too, but only with respect to the Lowlands (p. 40). When it comes to the Highlands, Boswell’s views appear to creep from the Classical towards the Romantic, foundering halfway between, for he remarks of Johnson (p. 74): “He always said that he was not come to Scotland to see fine places, of which there were enough in England, but wild objects – mountains, waterfalls, peculiar manners: in short, things which he had not seen before. I have a notion that he at no time has had much taste for rural beauties. I have very little.”

In fact, Johnson makes his views on Highland landscape very clear indeed. While Boswell babbles about a scene that is ‘as remote and agreeably wild as could be desired’ (p. 106), Johnson speaks of rocks ‘towering in horrid nakedness’ (p. 81), of mountain streams ‘discharging all their violence of waters by a sudden fall through the horrid chasm’ (p. 84), and, most revealingly of all, of heather (‘heath’) on the Highland hills (p. 88): “They exhibit very little variety; being almost wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility.” Curiously for a journey made in late August and September, there is no mention of the beauty of purple heather.

All in all, one can see exactly what Johnson meant when, once the trip was over, he was asked how he liked the Highlands (p. 437). “How, sir,” he replied, “can you ask me what obliges me to speak unfavourably of a country where I have been hospitably entertained? Who can like the Highlands? I like the inhabitants very well.”

Ronald Black, Peebles, 7 June 2011

Islands visited by Johnson and Boswell are shown in black. Numbers refer to chapters. Each chapter contains a more detailed map.

CHAPTER ONE

The Lowlands

SAMUEL JOHNSON

I had desired to visit the Hebrides, or Western Islands of Scotland, so long, that I scarcely remember how the wish was originally excited; and was in the Autumn of the year 1773 induced to undertake the journey, by finding in Mr Boswell a companion, whose acuteness would help my inquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners are sufficient to counteract the inconveniencies of travel, in countries less hospitable than we have passed.

On the eighteenth of August we left Edinburgh, a city too well known to admit description, and directed our course northward, along the eastern coast of Scotland, accompanied the first day by another gentleman, who could stay with us only long enough to shew us how much we lost at separation.1

As we crossed the Frith of Forth, our curiosity was attracted by Inch Keith, a small island, which neither of my companions had ever visited, though, lying within their view, it had all their lives solicited their notice. Here, by climbing with some difficulty over shattered crags, we made the first experiment of unfrequented coasts. Inch Keith is nothing more than a rock covered with a thin layer of earth, not wholly bare of grass, and very fertile of thistles. A small herd of cows grazes annually upon it in the summer. It seems never to have afforded to man or beast a permanent habitation.

We found only the ruins of a small fort, not so injured by time but that it might be easily restored to its former state. It seems never to have been intended as a place of strength, nor was built to endure a siege, but merely to afford cover to a few soldiers, who perhaps had the charge of a battery, or were stationed to give signals of approaching danger. There is therefore no provision of water within the walls, though the spring is so near, that it might have been easily enclosed. One of the stones had this inscription: “Maria Reg. 1564.” It has probably been neglected from the time that the whole island had the same king.2

We left this little island with our thoughts employed awhile on the different appearance that it would have made, if it had been placed at the same distance from London, with the same facility of approach; with what emulation of price a few rocky acres would have been purchased, and with what expensive industry they would have been cultivated and adorned.

When we landed, we found our chaise ready, and passed through Kinghorn, Kirkaldy, and Cowpar, places not unlike the small or straggling market-towns in those parts of England where commerce and manufactures have not yet produced opulence.

Though we were yet in the most populous part of Scotland, and at so small a distance from the capital, we met few passengers.

The roads are neither rough nor dirty; and it affords a southern stranger a new kind of pleasure to travel so commodiously without the interruption of toll-gates. Where the bottom is rocky, as it seems commonly to be in Scotland, a smooth way is made indeed with great labour, but it never wants repairs; and in those parts where adventitious materials are necessary, the ground once consolidated is rarely broken; for the inland commerce is not great, nor are heavy commodities often transported otherwise than by water. The carriages in common use are small carts, drawn each by one little horse; and a man seems to derive some degree of dignity and importance from the reputation of possessing a two-horse cart.

At an hour somewhat late we came to St Andrews, a city once archiepiscopal; where that university still subsists in which philosophy was formerly taught by Buchanan, whose name has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits.

We found, that by the interposition of some invisible friend, lodgings had been provided for us at the house of one of the professors, whose easy civility quickly made us forget that we were strangers; and in the whole time of our stay we were gratified by every mode of kindness, and entertained with all the elegance of lettered hospitality.3

In the morning we rose to perambulate a city, which only history shews to have once flourished, and surveyed the ruins of ancient magnificence, of which even the ruins cannot long be visible, unless some care be taken to preserve them; and where is the pleasure of preserving such mournful memorials? They have been till very lately so much neglected, that every man carried away the stones who fancied that he wanted them.

The cathedral, of which the foundations may be still traced, and a small part of the wall is standing, appears to have been a spacious and majestick building, not unsuitable to the primacy of the kingdom. Of the architecture, the poor remains can hardly exhibit, even to an artist, a sufficient specimen. It was demolished, as is well known, in the tumult and violence of Knox’s reformation.

Not far from the cathedral, on the margin of the water, stands a fragment of the castle, in which the archbishop anciently resided. It was never very large, and was built with more attention to security than pleasure. Cardinal Beatoun is said to have had workmen employed in improving its fortifications at the time when he was murdered by the ruffians of reformation, in the manner of which Knox has given what he himself calls a merry narrative.4

The change of religion in Scotland, eager and vehement as it was, raised an epidemical enthusiasm, compounded of sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity, which, in a people whom idleness resigned to their own thoughts, and who, conversing only with each other, suffered no dilution of their zeal from the gradual influx of new opinions, was long transmitted in its full strength from the old to the young, but by trade and intercourse with England, is now visibly abating, and giving way too fast to that laxity of practice and indifference of opinion, in which men, not sufficiently instructed to find the middle point, too easily shelter themselves from rigour and constraint.

The city of St Andrews, when it had lost its archiepiscopal preeminence, gradually decayed. One of its streets is now lost; and in those that remain, there is the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation.5

The university, within a few years, consisted of three colleges, but is now reduced to two; the college of St Leonard being lately dissolved by the sale of its buildings and the appropriation of its revenues to the professors of the two others. The chapel of the alienated college is yet standing, a fabrick not inelegant of external structure; but I was always, by some civil excuse, hindred from entering it.6 A decent attempt, as I was since told, has been made to convert it into a kind of green-house, by planting its area with shrubs. This new method of gardening is unsuccessful; the plants do not hitherto prosper. To what use it will next be put I have no pleasure in conjecturing. It is something that its present state is at least not ostentatiously displayed. Where there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.

The dissolution of St Leonard’s college was doubtless necessary; but of that necessity there is reason to complain. It is surely not without just reproach, that a nation, of which the commerce is hourly extending, and the wealth encreasing, denies any participation of its prosperity to its literary societies;7 and while its merchants or its nobles are raising palaces, suffers its universities to moulder into dust.

Of the two colleges yet standing, one is by the institution of its founder appropriated to Divinity. It is said to be capable of containing fifty students; but more than one must occupy a chamber. The library, which is of late erection, is not very spacious, but elegant and luminous.

The doctor, by whom it was shewn, hoped to irritate or subdue my English vanity by telling me, that we had no such repository of books in England.8