[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. 95.
[477] By John Macpherson, D.D. See post, Sept. 13.
[478] Sir Walter Scott, when in Sky in 1814, wrote:—'We learn that most of the Highland superstitions, even that of the second sight, are still in force.' Lockhart's Scott, ed. 1839, iv. 305. See .ante, ii. 10, 318.
[479] Of him Johnson wrote:—'One of the ministers honestly told me that he came to Sky with a resolution not to believe it.' Works, ix. 106.