THE OLD LIBRARY.
From the College the party went on to the Royal Infirmary. In the Bodleian Library I have found a copy of the History and Statutes of that institution printed in 1749. In it is given a table of the three kinds of diet which the patients were to have—“low, middle, and full.” The only vegetable food allowed was oatmeal and barley-meal, rice and panado.[432] There was no tea, coffee, or cocoa. The only drink was ale, but in “low diet” it was not to be taken. It is to be hoped that the Infirmary was not under the same severe ecclesiastical discipline as the workhouse. There the first failure to attend Divine worship was to be followed by the loss of the next meal, while for the second failure the culprit was “to be denied victuals for a whole day.”[433]
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE
& RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & CIE. PARIS.
INCH KEITH
HOLYROOD HOUSE.
The last sight which Johnson was shown in his “running about Edinburgh” was the Abbey of Holyrood House, “that deserted mansion of royalty,” as Boswell calls it with a sigh. It was more the absence of a charwoman than of a king that was likely to rouse the regrets of an Englishman. “The stately rooms,” wrote Wesley, “are dirty as stables.”[434] Even the chapel was in a state of “miserable neglect.”[435] It was in Holyrood that Robertson “fluently harangued” on the scenes of Scottish history. In the room in which David Rizzio was murdered “Johnson was overheard repeating in a kind of muttering tone, a line of the old ballad, Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night: