On the morning of Monday, November 22, the coach took up Johnson and off he drove homewards. On the following Saturday he wrote to Boswell from London:—“I came home last night, without any incommodity, danger, or weariness, and am ready to begin a new journey. I shall go to Oxford on Monday.” There he met Mr. John Scott and his young bride, and perhaps compared notes about Blackshields and the Newcastle road.[860] To his friend, Dr. Taylor, he wrote that “he had traversed the east coast of Scotland from south to north, from Edinburgh to Inverness, and the west-coast from north to south, from the Highlands to Glasgow.”[861]
HAWTHORNDEN.
“The time he spent in his Tour, was,” he often said, “the pleasantest part of his life.” I too have rarely spent my time more pleasantly than when I was following his traces both in that beautiful country through which he wandered, and in those old books in which still live the people, the manners, and the Scotland which he saw.
