Horace Walpole (Letters, vii. 291), in 1779, thus mentions this 'younger brother':--'Macdonald abused Lord North in very gross, yet too applicable, terms; and next day pleaded he had been drunk, recanted, and was all admiration and esteem for his Lordship's talents and virtues.'
[462] See ante, iii. 85, and post, Oct. 28.
[463] Cheyne's English Malady, ed. 1733, p. 229.
[464] 'Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.' Hamlet, act i. sc. 2. See ante, iii. 350, where Boswell is reproached by Johnson with 'bringing in gabble,' when he makes this quotation.
[465] VARIOUS READINGS. Line 2. In the manuscript, Dr. Johnson, instead of rupibus obsita, had written imbribus uvida, and uvida nubibus, but struck them both out. Lines 15 and 16. Instead of these two lines, he had written, but afterwards struck out, the following:--
Parare posse, utcunque jactet Grandiloquus nimis alta Zeno.
BOSWELL. In Johnson's Works, i. 167, these lines are given with some variations, which perhaps are in part due to Mr. Langton, who, we are told (ante, Dec. 1784), edited some, if not indeed all, of Johnson's Latin poems.
[466] Cowper wrote to S. Rose on May 20, 1789:--'Browne was an entertaining companion when he had drunk his bottle, but not before; this proved a snare to him, and he would sometimes drink too much.' Southey's Cowper, vi. 237. His De Animi Immortalitate was published in 1754. He died in 1760, aged fifty-four. See ante, ii. 339.
[467] Boswell, in one of his Hypochondriacks (ante, iv. 179) says:--'I do fairly acknowledge that I love Drinking; that I have a constitutional inclination to indulge in fermented liquors, and that if it were not for the restraints of reason and religion, I am afraid I should be as constant a votary of Bacchus as any man.... Drinking is in reality an occupation which employs a considerable portion of the time of many people; and to conduct it in the most rational and agreeable manner is one of the great arts of living. Were we so framed that it were possible by perpetual supplies of wine to keep ourselves for ever gay and happy, there could be no doubt that drinking would be the summum bonum, the chief good, to find out which philosophers have been so variously busied. But we know from humiliating experience that men cannot be kept long in a state of elevated drunkenness.'
[468] That my readers may have my narrative in the style of the country through which I am travelling, it is proper to inform them, that the chief of a clan is denominated by his surname alone, as M'Leod, M'Kinnon, M'lntosh. To prefix Mr. to it would be a degradation from the M'Leod, &c. My old friend, the Laird of M'Farlane, the great antiquary, took it highly amiss, when General Wade called him Mr. M'Farlane. Dr. Johnson said, he could not bring himself to use this mode of address; it seemed to him to be too familiar, as it is the way in which, in all other places, intimates or inferiors are addressed. When the chiefs have titles they are denominated by them, as Sir James Grant, Sir Allan M'Lean. The other Highland gentlemen, of landed property, are denominated by their estates, as Rasay, Boisdale; and the wives of all of them have the title of ladies. The tacksmen, or principal tenants, are named by their farms, as Kingsburgh, Corrichatachin; and their wives are called the mistress of Kingsburgh, the mistress of Corrichatachin.--Having given this explanation, I am at liberty to use that mode of speech which generally prevails in the Highlands and the Hebrides. BOSWELL.
[469] See ante, iii. 275.
[470] Boswell implies that Sir A. Macdonald's table had not been furnished plentifully. Johnson wrote:--'At night we came to a tenant's house of the first rank of tenants, where we were entertained better than at the landlord's.' Piozzi Letters, i. 141.
[471] 'Little did I once think,' he wrote to her the same day, 'of seeing this region of obscurity, and little did you once expect a salutation from this verge of European life. I have now the pleasure of going where nobody goes, and seeing what nobody sees.' Piozzi Letters, i. 120. About fourteen years since, I landed in Sky, with a party of friends, and had the curiosity to ask what was the first idea on every one's mind at landing. All answered separately that it was this Ode. WALTER SCOTT.
[472] See Appendix B.
[473] 'I never was in any house of the islands, where I did not find books in more languages than one, if I staid long enough to want them, except one from which the family was removed.' Johnson's Works, ix. 50. He is speaking of 'the higher rank of the Hebridians,' for on p. 61 he says:--'The greater part of the islanders make no use of books.'
[474] There was a Mrs. Brooks, an actress, the daughter of a Scotchman named Watson, who had forfeited his property by 'going out in the '45.' But according to The Thespian Dictionary her first appearance on the stage was in 1786.
[475] Boswell mentions, post, Oct. 5, 'the famous Captain of Clanranald, who fell at Sherrif-muir.'
[476] See ante, p.