Chapter L: M. K. J. M. K (1)

1747.

Johnson’s host was Lachlan Mackinnon, and the initials are, I suppose, his and his wife’s. It was but a small place to hold the large and festive company that was gathered at the time of our traveller’s visit; but, as Boswell says, “it was partly done by separating man and wife, and putting a number of men in one room and of women in another.” As I looked up at the windows which still remain, though the floors have fallen in, I wondered which was the room which was Johnson’s chamber at night, and the ladies’ parlour by day, where Boswell sat among them writing his journal.

[Sidenote: CHANGES IN SKYE.]

At the Hotel at Broadford, I was struck by the change that has come about since Johnson’s time, “in this verge of European life,” to use the term which he applied to Skye. Corrichatachin remains almost as he saw it. A house had fallen in ruins and had been replaced by another, and a small grove of trees had been planted. A garden had been made, and patches of ground which once were pasture had been ploughed up. But the broad face of nature is unchanged. This “region of obscurity,” is, however, obscure no longer. Where he was nearly ten weeks without receiving letters, now even the poor, far from their homes, by means of the telegraphic wire can, as it were, “live along the line.” A maid-servant who goes to distant services, on her arrival, by means of a telegram, at once frees her mother from her “heart-struck anxious care.” The owner of the hotel, from whom I learnt this fact, said that “Rowland Hill had done more for the poor man than all the ministers since, and that many of the Highlanders in gratitude had called their sons after him.”

RAASAY (SEPTEMBER 8-12).

From Corrichatachin our travellers rode down to the sea-side at Broadford, two miles off, where they took boat for the island of Raasay. The Macgillichallum, or laird of Raasay, John Macleod, had politely sent his coach and six, as he called his six-oared boat, to fetch them over. Though it was “thus dignified with a pompous name,” writes Johnson, “there was no seat, but an occasional bundle of straw. I never,” he adds, “saw in the Hebrides a boat furnished with benches.” In it had come the learned Donald M’Queen, a minister, and old Malcolm Macleod, who had been out in the ‘45, and had aided the Young Pretender in his escape. [Sidenote: THE HIGHLAND DRESS.] I had at one time thought that it was to him that Johnson alludes, when he speaks of having met one man, and one only, who defied the law against wearing the Highland dress. “By him,” he adds, “it was worn only occasionally and wantonly.”[615] I now believe, however, that it was Macdonald of Kingsburgh who was meant. Ever since the last rebellion the national garb had been suppressed. It had been enacted that “no person whatsoever should wear or put on those parts of the Highland clothes, garb, or habiliments which are called the plaid, philibeg,[616] or little kilt, or any of them.” Any offender “not being a landed man, or the son of a landed man” shall be tried before a justice of the peace “in a summary way, and shall be delivered over to serve as a soldier.”[617] Even the loyal Highlanders in the Duke of Cumberland’s army had been compelled in part to adopt the southern garb. “Near Linlithgow,” writes Henderson, “the whole army passed in review before their illustrious General. When the Highlanders passed he seemed much delighted with their appearance, saying, ‘They look very well; have breeches, and are the better for that.’”[618] Some years later when Pitt “called for soldiers from the mountains of the North,” “to allure them into the army it was thought proper to indulge them in the continuance of their national dress.”[619] Numerous were the devices to evade the law, and great must have been the perplexities of the magistrates. One of Wolfe’s officers wrote in 1752, that “one of his serjeants had taken a fellow wearing a blanket in form of a philibeg. He carried him to Perth, but the Sheriff-substitute did not commit him, because the blanket was not a tartan. On his return he met another of the same kind; so, as he found it needless to carry him before a magistrate, he took the blanket-philibeg and cut it to pieces.” Another officer wrote two months later: “One of my men brought me a man to all appearance in a philibeg; but on close examination I found it to be a woman’s petticoat, which answers every end of that part of the Highland dress. I sent him to the Sheriff-substitute, who dismissed him.”[620]

Smollett, in his _Humphry Clinker_, pleads the cause of the dejected Highlanders, who had not only been deprived of their ancient garb, but, “what is a greater hardship still, are compelled to wear breeches, a restraint which they cannot bear with any degree of patience; indeed the majority wear them, not in the proper place, but on poles or long staves over their shoulders.”[621] In 1782 the Marquis of Graham brought in a bill to repeal this prohibitory Act. One of the English members asked that if it became law, the dress should still be prohibited in England. When six Highland soldiers had been quartered at a house in Hampshire, “the singularity of their dress,” he said, “so much attracted the eyes of the wife and daughters of the man of the house that he found it expedient to take a lodging for them at another place.”[622] A Lowland friend tells me that one day at church her grandfather turned two Highland officers out of his pew, as he thought their dress improper where there were ladies. This she learnt from her aunt who had been present. Old Malcolm Macleod, if he did not return altogether to the ancient dress, nevertheless broke the law. “He wore a pair of brogues; tartan hose which came up only near to his knees, and left them bare; a purple camblet kilt; a black waistcoat; a short green cloth coat bound with gold cord; a yellowish bushy wig; a large blue bonnet with a gold thread button.” Sir Walter Scott tells us that “to evade the law against the tartan dress, the Highlanders used to dye their variegated plaids and kilts into blue, green, or any single colour.”[623] Malcolm had done this with his kilt, but in his hose he asserted his independence. Yet so early as the beginning of last century, according to Martin, the Highland dress was fast dying out in Skye. “They now,” he writes, “generally use coat, waistcoat, and breeches, as elsewhere. Persons of distinction wear the garb in fashion in the south of Scotland.”[624]

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[Sidenote: THE ROW TO RAASAY.]

While Johnson in the voyage to Raasay “sat high on the stern of the boat like a magnificent Triton,” old Malcolm, no less magnificent through his attire, took his turn at tugging the oar, “singing an Erse song, the chorus of which was _Hatyin foam foam eri_, with words of his own.” The original was written in praise of Allan of Muidart, a chief of the Clanranald family. The following is a translation of the complete chorus:

“Along, along, then haste along,
For here no more I’ll stay;
I’ll braid and bind my tresses long,
And o’er the hills away.”[625]

In the sound between Scalpa and Raasay, “the wind,” writes Boswell, “made the sea very rough. I did not like it. ‘This now,’ said Johnson, ‘is the Atlantic. If I should tell, at a tea-table in London, that I have crossed the Atlantic in an open boat, how they’d shudder, and what a fool they’d think me to expose myself to such danger.’” In his letter to Mrs. Thrale he makes light of the roughness of the waves. “The wind blew enough to give the boat a kind of dancing agitation.” For a moment or two his temper was ruffled, for by the carelessness of their man-servant his spurs were carried overboard. “There was something wild,” he said, “in letting a pair of spurs be carried into the sea out of a boat.” What a fine opening we have here for the enthusiasm of the Johnson Club! An expedition properly equipped should be sent to dredge in this sound for the spurs, with directions to proceed afterwards to the Isle of Mull, and make search for that famous piece of timber, his walking-stick, which was lost there.

[Sidenote: HIGHLAND SINGING.]

As the boat drew near the land the singing of the reapers on shore was mingled with the song of the rowers. It was frequently noticed by travellers how the Highlanders loved to keep time with their songs to whatever they were doing. Gray heard the masons singing in Erse all day long as they were building the park wall at Glamis Castle.[626] An earlier writer tells how “the women in harvest work keep time by several barbarous tones of the voice; and stoop and rise together as regularly as a rank of soldiers when they ground their arms. They proceed with great alacrity, it being disgraceful for anyone to be out of time with the sickle.”[627] According to Pennant, “in the songs of the rowers the notes are commonly long, the airs solemn and slow, rarely cheerful, it being impossible for the oars to keep a quick time; the words generally have a religious turn, consonant to that of the people.”[628] Ramsay of Ochtertyre says that “the women’s songs are in general very short and plaintive. In travelling through the remote Highlands in harvest, the sound of these little bands on every side has a most pleasing effect on the mind of a stranger.” The custom, we learn from him, was rapidly dying out at the end of last century.[629] I did not myself hear any of this singing in my wanderings; but a Scotch friend tells me that more than forty years ago she remembers seeing a field in which thirty Highland reapers were at work in couples, a man and a woman together, all singing their Gaelic songs.

[Sidenote: RAASAY.]

Three or four hours’ stout rowing brought the boat to the shore below the Laird of Raasay’s house. “The approach to it,” says Boswell, “was very pleasing. We saw before us a beautiful bay, well defended by a rocky coast; a good family mansion; a fine verdure about it, with a considerable number of trees; and beyond it hills and mountains in gradation of wildness.” At the entrance to the bay is a rocky islet, where we landed, when we visited Raasay on the afternoon of a bright June day. As it was unoccupied, we took formal possession, with a better claim than the European nations have to the well-peopled islands of the Southern Seas. Its name, we learnt from our boatman, was Goat Island, and just as Johnson was addressed as Island Isa, so we were willing to derive our title from our new acquisition. We passed a full half an hour in our domain with great satisfaction. Who, we asked, “would change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?” The waves beat on our coast, breaking in white crests far away in the open sound. We looked across the little bay on the sunny shore of our nearest neighbour, the Laird of Raasay, and did not envy him the pleasant grassy slope, almost ready for the scythe, which stretched from his mansion to the edge of the sea, or the fine woods which covered the hills at the back of his house. We thought how much the scene is changed since our travellers saw it. Then there was no landing-place; steps had not been even cut in the natural rock. “The crags,” Johnson complained, “were irregularly broken, and a false step would have been very mischievous.” Yet “a few men with pickaxes might have cut an ascent of stairs out of any part of the rock in a week’s time.” There is now a small stone pier. The hayfield, in the memory of people still living, was all heathland down to the water’s edge, with a rough cart-track running across it. Trees have been everywhere planted, and the hill-sides are beautifully wooded. Even before Johnson’s time something had been done in the way of improvement. Martin, in his _Description of the Western Isles_,[630] mentions “an orchard with several sorts of berries, pot-herbs, &c.” In the copy of Martin’s work in the Bodleian Library, Toland has entered in the margin: “Wonderful in Scotland anywhere.” Boswell mentions “a good garden, plentifully stocked with vegetables, and strawberries, raspberries, currants, &c.” The house—that “neat modern fabric,” which Johnson praises as “the seat of plenty, civility, and cheerfulness”—still remains, but it is almost hidden beneath the great additions which have in later years been made. In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, he says: “It is not large, though we were told in our passage that it had eleven fine rooms, nor magnificently furnished, but our utensils[631] were most commonly silver. We went up into a dining-room about as large as your blue room, where we had something given us to eat, and tea and coffee.” The blue room, less fortunate than its rival at Raasay, has been swept away, with all the beauty and the associations of Streatham Park. I was shown his chamber, with his portrait hanging on the wall. A walking-stick which he had used is treasured up. From his windows he looked down into the garden. However productive it may have been, it was not, I fear, so gay with flowers as it was when I saw it, or so rich in shrubs. I walked between fuchsia hedges that were much higher than my head. One fuchsia bush, or rather tree, which stood apart, covered with its branches a round of sixty feet. Its trunk was as thick as a man’s thigh. The Western Islands are kept free from severe frosts by the waters of the Gulf Stream, so that in the spots which face the southern suns, and are sheltered from the north and east, there is a growth which rivals, and perhaps outdoes, that of Devonshire and Cornwall.

Not far from the house is the ruined chapel which provoked Johnson’s sarcasm. “It has been,” he writes, “for many years popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the Romish clergy; over the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches we may indulge our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with the fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall.” Boswell took a more cheerful view. “There was something comfortable,” he wrote, “in the thought of being so near a piece of consecrated ground.” [Sidenote: THE MACLEODS OF RAASAY.] Here they looked upon the tombs of the Macleods of Raasay, that ancient family which boasted that “during four hundred years they had not gained or lost a single acre;” which was worthily represented in their host; which lasted for two generations longer, and then sank in ruins amidst the wild follies of a single laird. Whilst rack-renting landlords were driving their people across the wide Atlantic, Macleod of Raasay could boast “that his island had not yet been forsaken by a single inhabitant.” Pleased with all he saw, “Johnson was in fine spirits. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is truly the patriarchal life; this is what we came to find.’” He was delighted with the free and friendly life, the feasting and the dancing, and all “the pleasures of this little Court.” The evening of their arrival, as soon as dinner was finished, “the carpet was taken up, the fiddler of the family came, and a very vigorous and general dance was begun.” According to Boswell, “Johnson was so delighted with this scene, that he said, ‘I know not how we shall get away.’ It entertained me to observe him sitting by, while we danced, sometimes in deep meditation, sometimes smiling complacently, sometimes looking upon Hooke’s _Roman History_, and sometimes talking a little, amidst the noise of the ball, to Mr. Donald M’Queen, who anxiously gathered knowledge from him.” The same accommodating hospitality was shown here as at Corrichatachin in finding sleeping room for the large party that was assembled. “I had a chamber to myself,” writes Johnson, “which in eleven rooms to forty people was more than my share. How the company and the family were distributed is not easy to tell. Macleod, the chieftain of Dunvegan, and Boswell and I had all single chambers on the first floor. There remained eight rooms only for at least seven-and-thirty lodgers. I suppose they put up temporary beds in the dining-room, where they stowed all the young ladies. There was a room above stairs with six beds, in which they put ten men.” [Sidenote: THE PATRIARCHAL LIFE.] The patriarchal life was so complete that in this island, with a population estimated at nine hundred,[632] there was neither justice of the peace nor constable. Even in Skye there was but one magistrate, and, so late as forty years ago, but one policeman. Raasay is still without a justice. The people, I was told, settle all their disputes among themselves, and keep clear of crime. Much of the land is still held on the old tribal system. “I have ascertained,” writes Sir Henry Maine, “that the families which formed the village communities only just extinct in the Western Highlands had the lands of the village re-distributed among them by lot at fixed intervals of time.”[633] In Raasay there are little plots of land which every year are still distributed by lot. So small are they, and so close together that it often happens that five or six families are all at the same time getting in their harvest on a strip not much larger than a couple of lawn tennis grounds.

[Sidenote: SCOTTISH DANCES.]

Boswell with three Highland gentlemen spent one day in exploring the island, and in climbing to the top of Dun Can, or Raasay’s Cap, as sailors called the mountain, to whom far away at sea it was a conspicuous landmark. On the top they danced a Highland reel. If we may trust the statement of a young English tourist, the dance was just as enjoyable, though there were no ladies for partners. “The Scotch,” he writes, “admire the reel for its own merit alone. A Scotchman comes into an assembly room as he would into a field of exercise, dances till he is literally tired, possibly without ever looking at his partner. In most countries the men have a partiality for dancing with a woman: but here I have frequently seen four gentlemen perform one of these reels seemingly with the same pleasure as if they had had the most sprightly girl for a partner. They give you the idea that they could with equal glee cast off round a joint-stool or set to a corner cupboard.”[634] Beyond Dun Can to the north-west the travellers visited the ruins of the old castle, once the residence of the lairds of Raasay. On their return from their walk of four-and-twenty miles over very rugged ground, “we piqued ourselves,” Boswell writes, “at not being outdone at the nightly ball by our less active friends, who had remained at home.”

Of the ancient crosses which he mentions I fear but one is remaining. Martin, who looked upon them as pyramids to the deceased ladies of the family, found eight. Malcolm Macleod thought that they were “false sentinels—a common deception to make invaders imagine an island better guarded.” The learned M’Queen maintained that they “marked the boundaries of the sacred territory within which an asylum was to be had.” In this opinion Boswell concurred.

Delightful as the mansion at Raasay seemed to the travellers, with “the rough ocean and the rocky land, the beating billows and the howling storm without, while within was plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance,” yet it had seen another sight only seven-and-twenty years earlier. In the island the Young Pretender “in his distress was hidden for two nights, and the king’s troops burnt the whole country, and killed some of the cattle. You may guess,” continues Johnson, “at the opinions that prevail in this country; they are, however, content with fighting for their king; they do not drink for him. We had no foolish healths.” [Sidenote: AN EARTHLY PARADISE.] Pleased as our travellers were with their four days’ residence here, in the midst of storms and rain, how much would their pleasure have been increased could they have seen it as I saw it in the bright summer weather! No one who visited it then would have said with Johnson that “it has little that can detain a traveller, except the laird and his family.” It has almost everything that Nature can give in the delightfulness of scenery and situation.[635] Like Boswell, as I gazed upon it, I might “for a moment have doubted whether unhappiness had any place in Raasay;” but, like him, I might “soon have had the delusion dispelled,” by recalling Johnson’s lines:

“Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee.”

PORTREE AND KINGSBURGH (SEPTEMBER 12-13).

Much as Johnson had delighted in the patriarchal life at Raasay, yet after four days’ stay he became impatient to move. “There was,” writes Boswell, “so numerous a company, mostly young people, there was such a flow of familiar talk, so much noise, and so much singing and dancing, that little opportunity was left for his energetic conversation. He seemed sensible of this; for when I told him how happy they were at having him there, he said, ‘Yet we have not been able to entertain them much.’” The weather, which had been very wet and stormy, cleared up on the morning of September 12. “Though it was Sunday,” says Johnson, “we thought it proper to snatch the opportunity of a calm day.” [Sidenote: THE ROW TO PORTREE.] A row of some five or six miles brought them to Portree in Skye, a harbour whose name commemorated the visit of King James V. The busy little town on the top of the cliff, with its Court House, hotels, banks, and shops, which has grown up at the end of the land-locked harbour, did not then exist. Sir James Macdonald, “the Marcellus of Scotland,” as Boswell called him, had intended to build a village there, but by his untimely death the design had come to nothing. There seems to have been little more than the public-house at which the travellers dined. “It was,” Johnson believed, “the only one of the island.” He forgot, however, as Boswell pointed out to him when he read his narrative, another at Sconser, and a third at Dunvegan. “These,” Boswell adds, “are the only inns properly so called. There are many huts where whisky is sold.”[636] [Sidenote: HIGHLAND VOLUNTEERS.] On the evening which I spent at Portree, a company of Highland volunteers were going through their yearly inspection, in tartan plaids and kilts, with the bagpipes playing as only bagpipes can. Had it been as it was in the days of their forefathers, when twelve Highlanders and a bagpipe made a rebellion, there was ample provision made here for at least five or six. Each volunteer, in addition to his guilt as a rebel, both for the arms which he carried, and the garb which he wore, would have been liable to be sent off by summary process to serve as a common soldier. But happily we live in loyal days, and under milder laws. These bold citizen-soldiers ran but one risk, which no doubt was averted by a good-natured and sympathetic magistracy. To a fine of five shillings for being drunk and disorderly some of them certainly became exposed as the evening wore away. Let us hope that their excess was little more than an excess of loyalty in drinking the health of a Hanoverian queen.

[Sidenote: FLORA MACDONALD.]

At Portree our travellers took horse for Kingsburgh, a farmhouse on Loch Snizort, whither they went, though a little off their road, in order to see Flora Macdonald. She had married a gentleman of the same clan, and so had not changed her name. “Here,” writes Johnson, “I had the honour of saluting the far-famed Miss Flora Macdonald, who conducted the Prince, dressed as her maid, through the English forces, from the island of Lewis; and when she came to Skye, dined with the English officers, and left her maid below. She must then have been a very young lady—she is now not old—of a pleasing person and elegant behaviour. She told me that she thought herself honoured by my visit; and I am sure that whatever regard she bestowed on me was liberally repaid.” Boswell describes her as “a little woman of a genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well-bred. To see Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great champion of the English Tories, salute Miss Flora Macdonald in the Isle of Skye was a striking sight.” By _salute_ I have little doubt that both Boswell and Johnson meant _kiss_. Johnson in his _Dictionary_ gives it as the third meaning of the word, though he cites no authority for the usage. “The Scotch,” wrote Topham in 1774, “have still the custom of salutation on introduction to strangers. It very seldom happens that the salute is a voluntary one, and it frequently is the cause of disgust and embarrassment to the fair sex.”[637] By the uncouth appearance of the man who thus saluted her, Flora Macdonald might with good reason have been astonished, for “the news had reached her that Mr. Boswell was coming to Skye, and one Mr. Johnson, a young English buck, with him.” Her husband, “a large stately man, with a steady, sensible countenance,” who was going to try his fortune in America, was perhaps for that reason the more careless of obeying the laws of the country he was leaving. This evening he wore the Highland costume. “He had his tartan plaid thrown about him, a large blue bonnet with a knot of black riband like a cockade, a brown short coat of a kind of duffil, a tartan waistcoat with gold buttons and gold button-holes, a bluish philibeg, and tartan hose.” The bed-curtains of the room in which our travellers slept were also of tartan. Johnson’s bed had whatever fame could attach to it through its having been occupied for one night “by the grandson of the unfortunate King James the Second,” to borrow Boswell’s description of him. The grandson, before many years passed over his head, proved not unworthy of the grandfather—equally mean and equally selfish. The happy failure of the rebels hindered him from displaying his vices, with a kingdom for his stage. His worthlessness, which though it might have been suspected from his stock, could not have been known in his youth, takes away nothing, however, from the just fame of Flora Macdonald, “whose name will be mentioned in history, and, if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.” Johnson, after recounting how “the sheets which the Prince used were never put to any meaner offices, but were wrapped up by the lady of the house, and at last, according to her desire, were laid round her in her grave,” ends the passage with much satisfaction, by observing: “These are not Whigs.” Upon the table in the room he left a piece of paper “on which he had written with his pencil these words: _Quantum cedat virtutibus aurum_.”[638] He was thinking, no doubt, of the reward of £30,000 set upon Charles Edward’s head, and of the fidelity of the poor Highlanders who one and all refused to betray him. To more than fifty people he was forced in his wanderings to trust his life, many of them “in the lowest paths of fortune,” and not one of them proved faithless. It was well for him that he had not had to trust to fifty hangers-on of a Court.

[Sidenote: KINGSBURGH.]

The old house in which he had taken shelter for one night, and where Boswell and Johnson were so hospitably received, where they heard from their hostess the strange story of her adventures—this interesting old house no longer exists. Some of the trees which surround the modern residence must be old enough to have seen not only our two travellers, but also the fugitive Prince. As we looked upon it from the opposite shore of the narrow loch it seemed a pleasant spot, nearly facing the west, sheltered from the east by hills, and embosomed in trees, with meadows in front sloping down to the sea. In the rear rose barren dreary hills, but all their lower slopes were green with grass and with the young crops of oats. Far down the loch the green slopes ended in a steep rocky coast. In the distance the mountains of Lewis fringed the northern sky. The steep headland on which we sat was beautiful with grasses and flowers and ferns and heather. Of wild flowers we gathered no less than thirty-six varieties on this one small spot. We found even a lingering primrose, though June was rapidly drawing to its close. How different were our thoughts as we watched this peaceful scene from those which, one hundred and forty-three years earlier, had troubled the watchers as the young Wanderer slept! As the morning wore on, and he did not awake, one of them, in her alarm lest the soldiers should surprise him, roused her father, who was also in hiding, and begged that “they should not remain here too long. He said, ‘Let the poor man repose himself after his fatigues! and as for me, I care not, though they take off this old grey head ten or eleven years sooner than I should die in the course of nature.’ He then wrapped himself in the bed-clothes, and again fell fast asleep.” That same afternoon the two fugitives set off for Portree, where the Prince took boat for Raasay.

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DUNVEGAN CASTLE (SEPTEMBER 13-21).

[Sidenote: KINGSBURGH TO DUNVEGAN.]

Had our travellers ridden the whole distance from Kingsburgh to Dunvegan they would have travelled a weary way in rounding Lochs Snizort and Grishinish. But they sent their horses by land to a point on the other shore of the further loch, and crossed over themselves in Macdonald of Kingsburgh’s boat. “When,” said Johnson, “we take into computation what we have saved and what we have gained by this agreeable sail, it is a great deal.” They had still some miles of dreary riding through the most melancholy of moorlands. There were no roads or even paths. “A guide,” writes Boswell, “explored the way, much in the same manner as, I suppose, is pursued in the wilds of America, by observing certain marks known only to the inhabitants.” In some places the ground was so boggy that it would not bear the weight of horse and rider, and they were forced to dismount and walk. [Sidenote: DUNVEGAN CASTLE.] It was late in the afternoon when they reached Dunvegan Castle—that hospitable home where Johnson “tasted lotus, and was in danger,” as he said, “of forgetting that he was ever to depart.” This ancient seat of the Macleods was less beautiful, but far more interesting as he saw it than it is at the present day. The barrenness of nature has been covered with a luxuriant growth, and the land all around “which presented nothing but wild, moorish, hilly, and craggy appearances,” is now finely wooded. But while the setting is so greatly improved, the ancient building which is enshrined has suffered beneath the hand of a restorer. It is true that some great improvements have been made. The wing which had so long been left unfinished, through a superstitious fear that the owner would not long outlive the completion—“this skeleton of a castle,” as Johnson describes it—has been completed. A fine approach has been formed from the side of the land. But in the alterations which were made about fifty years ago an architect was employed who must surely have acquired his mischievous art in erecting sham fortresses on the banks of the Clyde for the wealthy traders of Glasgow. It is greatly to be wished that a judicious earthquake would bring to the ground his pepper-box turrets. Nevertheless, in spite of all that he has done—and he did his worst,—it still remains a noble pile, nobly placed. It is built on the rocky shore of a small bay, and well sheltered from the violence of the waves by an island which lies across the mouth, and by headlands on both sides. Through narrow inlets are seen the open waters of Loch Follart, and beyond them the everlasting hills. We saw it on a fine summer evening, when the long seaweeds were swaying in the gentle heaving of the tiny waves. Outside the bay two yachts were furling their sails, for the morrow was the day of rest. The sea-birds were hovering and screaming all around. A great heron was standing on a rock, with his white breast reflected in the water. A little to the north a long mast was lying on the beach, washed up from a wreck which, black with seaweed, is discovered at low tide. The old castle, the finely wooded hills, the rocks covered with fern and heath, the clear reflections in the sea of the mountains across the loch, the island, the inlets, the white sails of the yachts, the tranquil beauty of the summer evening—all moved us deeply. One thing only was wanting. [Sidenote: RORIE MORE’S NURSE.] The delightful weather which the country had so long enjoyed had silenced “Rorie More’s Nurse.” There was not water enough in it to have caught that good knight’s ear; still less to have lulled him to sleep. Johnson had seen it “in full perfection.” It was “a noble cascade,” he said. But he paid dearly for the fineness of the sight; for during the whole of his stay the weather was dreary, with high winds and violent rain. “We filled up the time as we could,” he writes; “sometimes by talk, sometimes by reading. I have never wanted books in the Isle of Skye.” So comfortably was he situated that he could hardly be persuaded to move on. “Here we settled,” he writes, “and did not spoil the present hour with thoughts of departure.” When on Saturday Boswell proposed that they should leave on the following Monday, when their week would be completed, he replied: “No, Sir, I will not go before Wednesday. I will have some more of this good.”

[Sidenote: THE LAIRD OF MACLEOD.]

He was fortunate in his hosts. The Laird, a young man of nineteen, quickly won his friendship. He had been the pupil at University College, Oxford, of George Strahan, who had been known to Johnson from his childhood. Boswell describes Macleod as “a most promising youth, who with a noble spirit struggles with difficulties, and endeavours to preserve his people. He has been left with an incumbrance of forty thousand pounds debt, and annuities to the amount of thirteen hundred pounds a year. Dr. Johnson said, ‘If he gets the better of all this, he’ll be a hero; and I hope he will. I have not met with a young man who had more desire to learn, or who has learnt more. I have seen nobody that I wish more to do a kindness to than Macleod.’” According to Knox, who was an impartial witness, he was an excellent landlord. Distressed though he was by this heavy burthen of debt, “he raised no rents, turned out no tenants, used no man with severity, and in all respects, and under the most pressing exigences, maintained the character of a liberal and humane friend of mankind.”[639] He formed at one time the design of writing his own Life. Unhappily he left but a fragment. His father had died early, so that on the death of his grandfather, the year before Johnson’s visit, he had succeeded to the property—the estates in Skye, the nine inhabited isles and the islands uninhabited almost beyond number. “He did not know to within twenty square miles the extent of his territories in Skye.” But vast as these domains were, the revenue which they produced was but small. One estate of eighty thousand acres was only rented at six hundred pounds a year.

“His grandfather,” he writes, “had entered upon his inheritance
in the most prosperous condition; but the course of his life
was expensive, his temper convivial and hospitable, and he
continued to impair his fortune till his death. He was the
first of our family who was led to leave the patriarchal
government of the clan, and to mix in the pursuits and ambition
of the world. He had always been a most beneficent chieftain,
but in the beginning of 1772, his necessities having lately
induced him to raise his rents, he became much alarmed by the
new spirit which had reached his clan. Aged and infirm he was
unable to apply the remedy in person; he devolved the task on
me, and gave me for an assistant our nearest male relation,
Colonel Macleod, of Talisker. The estate was loaded with debt,
encumbered with a numerous issue from himself and my father,
and charged with some jointures. His tenants had lost in that
severe winter above a third of their cattle.[640] My friend and
I were empowered to grant such deductions in the rents as might
seem reasonable; but we found it terrible to decide between the
justice to creditors, the necessities of an ancient family,
and the distresses of an impoverished tenantry. I called
the people together; I laid before them the situation of our
family; I acknowledged the hardships under which they laboured;
I reminded them of the manner in which their ancestors had
lived with mine; I combated their passion for America; I
promised to live among them; I desired every district to
point out some of their most respected men to settle with me
every claim, and I promised to do everything for their relief
which in reason I could. Our labour was not in vain. We gave
considerable abatements in the rents; few emigrated; and the
clan conceived the most lively attachment to me, which they
most effectually manifested.

“I remained at home till the end of 1774, but I consider this
as the most gloomy period of my life. Educated in a liberal
manner, fired with ambition, fond of society, I found myself in
confinement in a remote corner of the world; without any hope
of extinguishing the debts of my family, or of ever emerging
from poverty and obscurity. I had also the torment of seeing my
mother and sisters immured with me.

“In 1774 [1773] Dr. Samuel Johnson, with his companion, Mr.
Boswell, visited our dreary regions; it was my good fortune
to be enabled to practise the virtue of hospitality on this
occasion. The learned traveller spent a fortnight at Dunvegan;
and indeed amply repaid our cares to please him by the most
instructive and entertaining conversation. I procured for
him the company of the most learned clergymen and sagacious
inhabitants of the islands.”[641]

Macleod’s high praise of Johnson is in curious contradiction to Sir Walter Scott’s account, that “when winter-bound at Dunvegan, Johnson’s temper became most execrable, and beyond all endurance save that of his guide (Boswell).”[642] Mr. Croker, on receiving this account from Sir Walter, applied to the Laird’s son and successor, “who assured him emphatically they were all _delighted_ with him.”[643] Nevertheless, as I have already stated,[644] the young ladies of the family do not seem to have shared in this delight. The true Johnsonian must look upon them as “a set of wretched un-idea’d girls,” and so forgive their want of taste.

Macleod, two or three years after our traveller’s visit, raised a company of his own Highlanders, and entered the army. In the war against our colonists in America he and his wife, who had accompanied him, were taken prisoners. In their captivity they made the acquaintance and won the friendship of George Washington. Let us hope that the heart of the founder of the great American Commonwealth was softened towards the author of _Taxation no Tyranny_ by the anecdotes which he heard of him from his warm friend, the young Scottish chief. On his return home he raised the second battalion of the forty-second Highlanders, and served with distinction in India as their colonel. Zoffany painted him in his soldier’s dress, surrounded with elephants, camels, and Hindoos, with Highland scenery in the background. Just before he started for the East he dined at the house of one of his _tacksmen_, or chief tenants, “who said that all the dishes should be the produce of Macleod’s estate and the shores thereof. Amongst a profusion of other dishes there were thirteen different kinds of fish.”[645] He died in 1802 at the early age of forty-six.

[Sidenote: LADY MACLEOD.]

Fortunate as Johnson was in having this amiable and high-spirited youth for his host, scarcely less fortunate was he in his hostess, the Laird’s mother, Lady Macleod. The title which she bore was one of courtesy. Up to this time the wives of Highland lairds, and also of Scotch judges, seem commonly to have been addressed as _Lady_. Johnson’s hostess at Lochbuie, the wife of the laird, is called Lady Lochbuie by Boswell. The change to the modern usage had, however, begun; for Ramsay of Ochtertyre, speaking of the year 1769, says that, “Somebody asked Lord Auchinleck before his second marriage if the lady was to be called Mrs. Boswell, according to the modern fashion.”[646] Johnson was not wholly a stranger to his hostess. “I had once,” he writes, “attracted her notice in London.” She was able to render his stay pleasant, for from her long residence in England, “she knew all the arts of southern elegance, and all the modes of English economy.” In his talk she took great delight, though when one day she heard him maintain ““that no man was naturally good more than a wolf, and no woman either,” she said in a low voice, ‘This is worse than Swift.’” Knox, who visited Dunvegan in 1786 records the following anecdote:—

“Lady Macleod, who had repeatedly helped Dr. Johnson to
sixteen dishes or upwards of tea, asked him if a small basin
would not save him trouble, and be more agreeable. ‘I wonder,
Madam,’ answered he roughly, ‘why all the ladies ask me such
impertinent questions. It is to save yourselves trouble,
Madam, and not me.’ The lady was silent and went on with her
task.”[647]

It is not likely that Knox had the story at first hand, for when he visited Dunvegan, the Castle was occupied by a Major Alexander Macleod, who had married a daughter of Flora Macdonald. It is probable, therefore, that Lady Macleod was not living there at the time. The number of cups of tea may have grown as the story passed from one to another. We shall find in the next chapter that at Ulinish Johnson was reported to have exceeded even this feat in tea-drinking. Lady Eldon used to relate that one evening at Oxford she had helped him to fifteen. Cumberland, who was not famed for accuracy, did not go beyond a dozen as the number supplied to the great man by Mrs. Cumberland. Short even of this Johnson might very well “have turned his cup,” as he had done at Aberbrothick, and muttered, “_claudite jam rivos, pueri_.”

[Sidenote: THE OLD ROCK.]

Lady Macleod was discontented with the barrenness of Dunvegan, and longed to move the seat of the family to a spot about five miles off, “where she could make gardens and other ornaments. She insisted that the rock was very inconvenient; that there was no place near it where a good garden could be made; that it must always be a rude place; that it was a _Herculean_ labour to make a dinner here.” “I was vexed,” writes Boswell, “to find the alloy of modern refinement in a lady who had so much old family spirit. ‘Have all the comforts and conveniences of life upon it,’ I said, ‘but never leave Rorie More’s cascade.’ ‘It is very well for you,’ she replied, ‘who have a fine place, and everything easy, to talk thus, and think of chaining honest folks to a rock. You would not live upon it yourself.’ ‘Yes, Madam,’ said I, ‘I would live upon it, were I Laird of Macleod, and should be unhappy if I were not upon it.’ JOHNSON (with a strong voice and most determined manner). ‘Madam, rather than quit the old rock, Boswell would live in the pit; he would make his bed in the dungeon.’ The lady was puzzled a little. She still returned to her pretty farm—rich ground—fine garden. ‘Madam,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘were they in Asia, I would not leave the rock.’”

Her visitors were in the right. The scene was too noble a one to be lightly deserted. There was no need to go five miles for trees and gardens. [Sidenote: DR. JOHNSON’S PLANTATIONS.] The Scotch for their carelessness in adorning their homes did not here fall on deaf ears. His host and his host’s son planted largely, and the fruit of his advice and of their judicious labours is seen in the beautiful woods and shrubberies which surround the Castle. Rorie More’s Cascade is almost hidden by trees. A Dutch garden has been formed, where, under the shelter of the thick beech hedge which encloses it, the roses bloom. Close to the ruins of an ancient chapel, with glimpses through the trees of the waters of the Loch, a conservatory has been built. Had Johnson seen the beautiful and rare flowers which grow in it, he would surely never have maintained that “a green-house is a childish thing.” What a change has come since the day when he wrote that “the country about Dunvegan is rough and barren. There are no trees except in the orchard, which is a low, sheltered spot, surrounded with a wall.” The rough old fellow passed over the land with his strong common sense and his vigorous reproofs, and the rudeness of nature has been tamed, and its barrenness changed into luxuriance. He deserved better of mankind even than he “who made two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before;”[648] for he made trees and flowers to grow where before there had been none. He did that which a king of Scotland had tried to do and failed. James the Fifth’s command that round every house plantations should be made had resulted, I was told, in the few trees which Johnson saw. But where the king’s could be almost counted on the fingers of the two hands, Johnson’s cover whole hill-sides. I was informed by Miss Macleod, of Macleod, for whose kindness I am most grateful, that she had no doubt that it was his reproaches which stirred up her grandfather to plant so widely. How luxuriantly nature can deck the ground when she is aided by art, was seen in the strange variety of flowers which we noticed in the grounds. Two seasons seemed to be mingled into one, for we found at the same time wild roses, the hawthorn, blue bells, cuckoo flowers, heather, lupins, laburnums, and rhododendrons.

In ancient days the only access to the castle, says Sir Walter Scott, was “from the sea by a subterranean staircase, partly arched, partly cut in the rock, which winding up through the cliff opened into the court.”[649] These steps Johnson oddly describes as “a pair of stairs,” just as if they were in an Oxford college or the Temple. When the tide was up access was cut off, so that a visitor who had arrived by land must at the very end of his journey have taken boat in order to gain the entrance. A little above the lower gate, on the side of the passage, there was an old well, with uncovered mouth. At the christening of the present laird, one of the guests who had drunk too freely, going down the steps to his boat, fell in and was drowned. The well was at once enclosed, and has never been used since. Even in Johnson’s time its water, though not brackish in spite of its being so near to the sea, was not much used. The stream which formed Rorie More’s Cascade was thought to afford a purer supply. It was not by this staircase that our travellers entered the castle, but by a long flight of steps which the last laird had made on the side of the land. They were not guarded by hand-rails. Many years ago a milkmaid coming up them with her pails on a stormy day, was carried over by a high wind, and much hurt. They have given place to the present approach by a carriage-road carried over the chasm which cut off the castle from the neighbouring land.

[Sidenote: THE STATELY DINING-ROOM.]

On the walls of the “stately dining-room” where our travellers were first received, I saw hanging some fine portraits by Raeburn, their host and his wife and their eldest son, a lad with a sweet honest face, who was lost with his ship, the Royal Charlotte, in the Bay of Naples. Near them hang “the wicked laird” and his two wives. There is a tradition that his first wife had fled from him on account of his cruelty, but had been enticed back by a friendly letter. When her husband had caught her, he starved her to death in the dungeon. It was no doubt the sight of these pictures which one day at table led the company to talk of portraits; when Johnson maintained that “their chief excellence is being like. One would like,” he added, “to see how Rorie More looked. Truth, Sir, is of the greatest value in these things.”

In the same room stands a handsome old sideboard, bearing the date of 1603. Though it goes back to the year of the union of the two Crowns, yet of all the festive gatherings which it has witnessed, perhaps there is none that was more striking than that evening when the Highland gentlemen listened to Johnson’s “full strain of eloquence. We were,” writes Boswell, “a jovial company at supper. The laird, surrounded by so many of his clan, was to me a pleasing sight. They listened with wonder and pleasure while Dr. Johnson harangued.” [Sidenote: SIR WALTER SCOTT AT DUNVEGAN.] It was very likely in this same room that Sir Walter Scott breakfasted that August morning forty-one years later, “when he woke under the castle of Dunvegan. I had,” he writes, “sent a card to the laird of Macleod, who came off before we were dressed, and carried us to his castle to breakfast.”[650]

The noble drawing-room, with the deep recesses for the windows in walls nine feet thick, is not the one described by Boswell. The drawing-room which he saw “had formerly been,” he says, “the bed-chamber of Sir Roderick Macleod, and he chose it because behind it there was a cascade, the sound of which disposed him to sleep.” At the time of Sir Walter Scott’s visit it had again become a bed-room, for here he slept on a stormy night. [Sidenote: THE HAUNTED ROOM.] He had accepted, he says, “the courteous offer of the haunted apartment,” and this was the room which was given him. “An autumnal blast, sometimes clear, sometimes driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of the lake, which it occasionally concealed and by fits disclosed. The waves rushed in wild disorder on the shore, and covered with foam the steep pile of rocks, which rising from the sea in forms something resembling the human figure have obtained the name of Macleod’s Maidens. The voice of an angry cascade, termed the nurse of Rorie More, was heard from time to time mingling its notes with those of wind and wave. Such was the haunted room at Dunvegan; and as such it well deserved a less sleepy inhabitant.”[651] This account Sir Walter wrote many years later from memory. The rocks which he saw were not Macleod’s Maidens; from them he was separated by nearly ten miles of mountains and lochs.

[Sidenote: DUNVEGAN’S THREE TREASURES.]