The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson | Page 5

the Scots; they are nearer the sun; their blood is richer,
and more mellow: but when I humour any of them in an outrageous
contempt of Scotland, I fairly own I treat them as children. And thus I
have, at some moments, found myself obliged to treat even Dr Johnson.
To Scotland however he ventured; and he returned from it in great
humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful
feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated; as is evident from
that admirable work, his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,
which, to my utter astonishment, has been misapprehended, even to
rancour, by many of my countrymen.
To have the company of Chambers and Scott, he delayed his journey so
long, that the court of session, which rises on the eleventh of August,
was broke up before he got to Edinburgh.
On Saturday the fourteenth of August, 1773, late in the evening, I
received a note from him, that he was arrived at Boyd's inn, at the head
of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially;
and I exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually in Caledonia.
Mr Scott's amiable manners, and attachment to our Socrates, at once
united me to him. He told me that, before I came in, the Doctor had
unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no
fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon
which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar, and

put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of the window.
Scott said, he was afraid he would have knocked the waiter down. Mr
Johnson told me, that such another trick was played him at the house of
a lady in Paris. He was to do me the honour to lodge under my roof. I
regretted sincerely that I had not also a room for Mr Scott. Mr Johnson
and I walked arm-in-arm up the High Street, to my house in James's
court: it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the
evening effluvia of Edinburgh. I heard a late baronet, of some
distinction in the political world in the beginning of the present reign,
observe, that 'walking the streets of Edinburgh at night was pretty
perilous, and a good deal odoriferous'. The peril is much abated, by the
care which the magistrates have taken to enforce the city laws against
throwing foul water from the windows; but, from the structure of the
houses in the old town, which consist of many stories, in each of which
a different family lives, and there being no covered sewers, the odour
still continues. A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr Johnson to
be without one of his five senses upon this occasion. As we marched
slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, 'I smell you in the dark!' But he
acknowledged that the breadth of the street, and the loftiness of the
buildings on each side, made a noble appearance.
My wife had tea ready for him, which it is well known he delighted to
drink at all hours, particularly when sitting up late, and of which his
able defence against Mr Jonas Hanway should have obtained him a
magnificent reward from the East India Company. He shewed much
complacency upon finding that the mistress of the house was so
attentive to his singular habit; and as no man could be more polite
when he chose to be so, his address to her was most courteous and
engaging; and his conversation soon charmed her into a forgetfulness
of his external appearance.
I did not begin to keep a regular full journal till some days after we had
set out from Edinburgh; but I have luckily preserved a good many
fragments of his Memorabilia from his very first evening in Scotland.
We had, a little before this, had a trial for murder, in which the judges
had allowed the lapse of twenty years since its commission as a plea in

bar, in conformity with the doctrine of prescription in the civil law,
which Scotland and several other countries in Europe have adopted. He
at first disapproved of this; but then he thought there was something in
it, if there had been for twenty years a neglect to prosecute a crime
which was KNOWN. He would not allow that a murder, by not being
DISCOVERED for twenty years, should escape punishment. We talked
of the ancient trial by duel. He did not think it so absurd as is generally
supposed; 'For,' said he, 'it was only allowed when the question was in
equilibria, as when one affirmed and another denied; and they had a
notion that Providence