he was inclined " to expatiate rather too strongly upon the benefits

derived to their country from the Union." 1 ' "'We have taught you,' said he, 'and we'll do the same in time to all barbarous nations, to the Cherokees, and at last to the Ouran-Outangs,' laughing with as much glee as if Monboddo had been present. BOSWELL. 'We had wine before the Union.' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not make you drunk.' BOSWELL. ' I assure you, Sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness.' JOHNSON. ' No, Sir ; there were people who

Such pleasantry as this could hardly have given offence to any- one into whose skull a jest could penetrate by any operation short of a surgical one. But it was a very different matter when the spoken jest passed into a serious expression of opinion in print. All the theoretic philosophy of which Scotland justly boasts was hardly sufficient to support with patience such a passage as the following : ' Till the Union made the Scots acquainted with Eng- lish manners the culture of their lands was unskilful, and thetr domestic life unformed ; their tables were coarse as the feasts of Esquimaux, and their houses filthy as the cottages of Hottentots. " :: His attacks on the Highlanders would have been read with patience, if not with pleasure, in Lowland circles. "His account of the Isles," wrote Beattie, " is, I dare say, very just. I never was there." These were not the "asperities " of which that amiable poet complained. Yet they were asperities which might have pro- voked an incensed Highlander to give the author " a crack on his skull," had he looked not to the general tenour of the narrative, but to a few rough passages scattered up and down. M'Nicol would surely have roused the anger of his countrymen to a fiercer heat had he forborne to falsify Johnson's words, and strung together instead a row of his sarcastic sayings. The offensive passages are not in- deed numerous, but out of such a collection as the following irrita- tion enough might have been provided : " the genuine improvi- dence of savages ; " " a muddy mixture of pride and ignorance ; " " " the chiefs gradually degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapa-

^ Boswell's Johnson, v. 128. = Ib. v . 248. hut the first Lord Lyltclton who was meant. See

Works, ix. 24. Hottentot "a respectable my J),: Johnson : His Friends ami //is Cri/ics,

ttentot was the term which for more than p. 214, and my edition of Boswell's Johnson,

a hundred years was supposed to have been i. 267.

applied to Johnson by Lord Chesterfield. I J Forbes's Life of Beattie, p. 217.

have proved, however, that it was not Johnson, ' Works, ix. 76. u Ib. p. 86.

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