The indemnification that the see obtained was, that the Lord of Badenoch stood for three days bare-footed at the great gate of the cathedral. The story is in the Chartulary of Elgin.' BOSWELL. The cathedral was rebuilt in 1407-20, but the lead was stripped from the roof by the Regent Murray, and the building went to ruin. Murray's Handbook, ed. 1867, p. 303. 'There is,' writes Johnson (Works, ix. 20), 'still extant in the books of the council an order ... directing that the lead, which covers the two cathedrals of Elgin and Aberdeen, shall be taken away, and converted into money for the support of the army.... The two churches were stripped, and the lead was shipped to be sold in Holland. I hope every reader will rejoice that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea.' On this Horace Walpole remarks (Letters, vii. 484):--'I confess I have not quite so heinous an idea of sacrilege as Dr. Johnson. Of all kinds of robbery, that appears to me the lightest species which injures nobody. Dr. Johnson is so pious that in his journey to your country he flatters himself that all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church.'
[354] I am not sure whether the Duke was at home. But, not having the honour of being much known to his grace, I could not have presumed to enter his castle, though to introduce even so celebrated a stranger. We were at any rate in a hurry to get forward to the wildness which we came to see. Perhaps, if this noble family had still preserved that sequestered magnificence which they maintained when catholicks, corresponding with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, we might have been induced to have procured proper letters of introduction, and devoted some time to the contemplation of venerable superstitious state. BOSWELL. Burnet (History of his own Times, ii. 443, and iii. 23) mentions the Duke of Gordon, a papist, as holding Edinburgh Castle for James II. in 1689.
[355] 'In the way, we saw for the first time some houses with fruit-trees about them. The improvements of the Scotch are for immediate profit; they do not yet think it quite worth their while to plant what will not produce something to be eaten or sold in a very little time.' Piozzi Letters, i. 121.
[356] 'This was the first time, and except one the last, that I found any reason to complain of a Scottish table.' Johnson's Works, ix. 19.
[357] The following year Johnson told Hannah More that 'when he and Boswell stopt a night at the spot (as they imagined) where the Weird Sisters appeared to Macbeth, the idea so worked upon their enthusiasm, that it quite deprived them of rest. However they learnt the next morning, to their mortification, that they had been deceived, and were quite in another part of the country' H. More's Memoirs, i. 50.
[358] See ante, p. 76.
[359] Murphy (Life, p. 145) says that 'his manner of reciting verses was wonderfully impressive.' According to Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 302), 'whoever once heard him repeat an ode of Horace would be long before they could endure to hear it repeated by another.'
[360] Then pronounced Affleck, though now often pronounced as it is written. Ante, ii. 413.
[361] At this stage of his journey Johnson recorded:--'There are more beggars than I have ever seen in England; they beg, if not silently, yet very modestly.' Piozzi Letters, i. 122. See ante, p. 75, note 1.
[362] Duncan's monument; a huge column on the roadside near Fores, more than twenty feet high, erected in commemoration of the final retreat of the Danes from Scotland, and properly called Swene's Stone. WALTER SCOTT.
[363] Swift wrote to Pope on May 31, 1737:--'Pray who is that Mr. Glover, who writ the epick poem called Leonidas, which is reprinting here, and has great vogue?' Swift's Works (1803), xx. 121. 'It passed through four editions in the first year of its publication (1737-8).' Lowndes's Bibl. Man. p. 902. Horace Walpole, in 1742, mentions Leonidas Glover (Letters, i. 117); and in 1785 Hannah More writes (Memoirs, i. 405):--'I was much amused with hearing old Leonidas Glover sing his own fine ballad of Hosier's Ghost, which was very affecting. He is past eighty [he was seventy-three]. Mr. Walpole coming in just afterwards, I told him how highly I had been pleased. He begged me to entreat for a repetition of it. It was the satire conveyed in this little ballad upon the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole's ministry which is thought to have been a remote cause of his resignation. It was a very curious circumstance to see his son listening to the recital of it with so much complacency.'
[364] See ante, i. 125.
[365] See ante, i. 456, and post, Sept. 22.
[366] See ante, ii. 82, and post, Oct. 27.
[367] 'Nairne is the boundary in this direction between the highlands and lowlands; and until within a few years both English and Gaelic were spoken here. One of James VI.'s witticisms was to boast that in Scotland he had a town "sae lang that the folk at the tae end couldna understand the tongue spoken at the tother."' Murray's Handbook for Scotland, ed. 1867, p.