Hebrid. Tour to was not a day for travelling. At breakfast, Dr. Johnson told us, "there was once a pretty good tavern in Catharine-street in the Strand, where very good company met in an evening, and each man called for his own half-pint of wine, or gill, if he pleased; they were frugal men, and nobody paid but for what he himself drank. The house furnished no supper; but a woman attended with mutton-pies, which any body might purchase. I was introduced to this company by Cumming the Quaker', and used to go there sometimes when I drank wine. In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield, after having been in London, my mother asked me, whether I was one of those who gave the wall, or those who took it. Now, it is fixed that every man keeps to the right; or, if one is taking the wall, another yields it, and it is never a dispute." He was very severe on a lady, whose name was mentioned. He said, he 1 [Thomas Cumming was a bold and busy man, who mistook his vocation when he turned quaker (for he was not born in that sect). He planned and almost commanded a military expedition to the coast of Africa, in 1758, which ended in the capture of Senegal. It and its author make a considerable figure in Smollett's History of England, vol. ii. p. 278, where the anomaly of a quaker's heading an army is attempted to be excused by the event of the enemy's having surrendered without fighting; and a protest that Cumming would not have engaged in it had he not been assured, that against an overpowering force the enemy could not have resisted. This reminds us of another story of Cumming. During the rebellion of 1745, he was asked, whether the time was not come when even he, as a quaker, ought to take arms for the civil and religious liberties of his country? "No," said Cumming, "but I will drive an ammunition waggon." Yet this bustling man was, it seems, morbidly sensitive. Mrs. Piozzi says he died heart-broken by a libel in a periodical paper. " Dr. Johnson once told me that Cummings, the famous quaker, whose friendship he valued very highly, fell a sacrifice to the insults of the newspapers, having declared on his death-bed to Dr. Johnson, that the pain of an anonymous letter, written in some of the common prints of the day, fastened on his heart, and threw him into the slow fever of which he died."-Piozzi's Anecdotes, p. 143. Mr. Chalmers is in possession of one of those libels, found, as he believes, in the Town and Country Magazine, in which, by a wooden cut, and under the name of Tomacumingo, his person and principles are certainly severely handled, but nothing to die of. The date, however, of this paper, which Mr. Chalmers believes to have been published in 1774, the year in which Cumming died, gives some countenance to Johnson's anecdote.-ED.] would have sent her to St. Kilda. That she was as Tour to bad as negative badness could be, and stood in the way of what was good: that insipid beauty would not go a great way; and that such a woman might be cut out of a cabbage, if there was a skilful artificer. Dr. Macleod was too late in coming to breakfast. Johnson said, laziness was worse than the toothache. BOSWELL." I cannot agree with you, sir; a basin of cold water, or a horsewhip, will cure laziness." JOHNSON. "No, sir; it will only put off the fit; it will not cure the disease. I have been trying to cure my laziness all my life, and could not do it." BOSWELL. "But if a man does in a shorter time what might be the labour of a life, there is nothing to be said against him." JOHNSON (perceiving at once that I alluded to him and his Dictionary). Suppose that flattery to be true, the consequence would be, that the world would have no right to censure a man; but that will not justify him to himself." 66 After breakfast, he said to me, "A Highland chief should now endeavour to do every thing to raise his rents, by means of the industry of his people. Formerly, it was right for him to have his house full of idle fellows; they were his defenders, his servants, his dependants, his friends. Now they may be better employed. The system of things is now so much altered, that the family cannot have influence but by riches, because it has no longer the power of ancient feudal times. An individual of a family may have it; but it cannot now belong to a family, unless you could have a perpetuity of men with the same views. Macleod has four times the land that the Duke of Bedford has. I think, with his spirit, he may in time make himself the greatest man in the king's Hebrid. Hebrid. Tour to dominions; for land may always be improved to a certain degree. I would never have any man sell land, to throw money into the funds, as is often done, or to try any other species of trade. Depend upon You and I it, this rage of trade will destroy itself. Dr. Johnson said this morning, when talking of Tuesday, 21st September.-The uncertainty of our present situation having prevented me from receiving any letters from home for some time, I could not help being uneasy. Dr. Johnson had an advantage over me in this respect, he having no wife or child to occasion anxious apprehensions in his mind. 'Aul. Gellius, lib. v. c. xiv.-BOSWELL. Hebrid. It was a good morning; so we resolved to set out. Tour to But, before quitting this castle, where we have been so well entertained, let me give a short description of it. Along the edge of the rock, there are the remains of a wall, which is now covered with ivy. A square court is formed by buildings of different ages, particularly some towers, said to be of great antiquity; and at one place there is a row of false cannon' of stone. There is a very large unfinished pile, four stories high, which we were told was here when Leod, the first of this family, came from the Isle of Man, married the heiress of the M'Crails, the ancient possessors of Dunvegan, and afterwards acquired by conquest as much land as he had got by marriage. He surpassed the house of Austria; for he was felix both bella gerere et nubere. John Breck3 Macleod, the grandfather of the late laird, began to repair the castle, or rather to complete it: but he did not live to finish his undertaking. Not doubting, however, that he should do it, he, like those who have had their epitaphs written before they died, ordered the following inscription, composed by the minister of the parish, to be cut upon a broad stone above one of the lower windows, where it still remains to celebrate what was not done, and to serve as a memento of the uncertainty of life, and the presumption of man*: [Dunvegan Castle is mounted with real cannon; not unnecessarily, for its situation might expose it in war time to be plundered by privateers.-WALTER SCOTT.] [This is an allusion to a celebrated epigram, quoted with so much effect by the late Mr. Whitbread, in a speech in the house of commons (9th March, 1810), in allusion to the marriage of the Archduchess Maria Louisa with Buonaparte. "Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube; Quæ dat Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus."-ED.] [Breck means marked with the small-pox.-ED.] [It is now finished, though not on so lofty a scale as was originally designed. -ED.] Tour to "Joannes Macleod Beganoduni Dominus gentis suæ Philarchus 1, Durinesiæ Haraiæ Vaternesiæ, &c. Baro D. Flora Macdonald matrimoniali vinculo conjugatus turrem hanc Beganodunensem proavorum habitaculum longe vetustissimum diu penitus labefectatam Anno æræ vulgaris MDCLXXXVI instauravit. "Quem stabilire juvat proavorum tecta vetusta, Omne scelus fugiat, justitiamque colat. Inque casas humiles tecta superba nefas." Macleod and Talisker accompanied us. We passed by the parish church of Durinish. The churchyard is not enclosed, but a pretty murmuring brook runs along one side of it. In it is a pyramid erected to the memory of Thomas Lord Lovat, by his son Lord Simon, who suffered on Tower-hill. It is of freestone, and, I suppose, about thirty feet high. There is an inscription on a piece of white marble inserted in it, which I suspect to have been the composition of Lord Lovat himself, being much in his pompous style. I have preserved this inscription, though of no great value, thinking it characteristical of a man who [The minister seems to have been no contemptible Latinist. Is not Philarchus a very happy term to express the paternal and kindly authority of the head of a clan? Macleod's titles run in English," Lord of Dunvegan, Chief of his Clan, Baron of Durinish, Harris, Waterness," &c.—ED.] "This pyramid was erected by Simon Lord Fraser, of Lovat, in honour of Lord Thomas his father, a peer of Scotland, and chief of the great and ancient clan of the Frasers. Being attacked for his birthright by the family of Atholl, then in power and favour with King William, yet, by the valour and fidelity of his clan, and the assistance of the Campbells, the old friends and allies of his family, he defended his birthright with such greatness and fermety of soul, and such valour and activity, that he was an honour to his name, and a good pattern to all brave chiefs of clans. He died in the month of May, 1699, in the sixty-third year of his age, in Dunvegan, the house of the Laird of Macleod, whose sister he had married: by whom he had the above Simon Lord Fraser, and several other children. And, for the great love he bore to the family of Macleod, he desired to be buried near his wife's relations, in the place where two of her uncles lay. And his son Lord Simon, to show to posterity his great affection for his mother's kindred, the brave Macleods, chooses rather to leave his father's bones with them, than carry them to his own burial-place, near Lovat." |