[498] 'No man is so abstemious as to refuse the morning dram, which they call a skalk.' Johnson's Works, ix. p. 51.
[499] Alexander Macleod, of Muiravenside, advocate, became extremely obnoxious to government by his zealous personal efforts to engage his chief Macleod, and Macdonald of Sky, in the Chevalier's attempts of 1745. Had he succeeded, it would have added one third at least to the Jacobite army. Boswell has oddly described M'Cruslick, the being whose name was conferred upon this gentleman, as something between Proteus and Don Quixote. It is the name of a species of satyr, or esprit follet, a sort of mountain Puck or hobgoblin, seen among the wilds and mountains, as the old Highlanders believed, sometimes mirthful, sometimes mischievous. Alexander Macleod's precarious mode of life and variable spirits occasioned the soubriquet. WALTER SCOTT.
[500] Johnson also complained of the cheese. 'In the islands they do what I found it not very easy to endure. They pollute the tea-table by plates piled with large slices of Cheshire cheese, which mingles its less grateful odours with the fragrance of the tea.' Works, ix. 52.
[501] 'The estate has not, during four hundred years, gained or lost a single acre.' Ib. p. 55.
[502] Lord Stowell told me, that on the road from Newcastle to Berwick, Dr. Johnson and he passed a cottage, at the entrance of which were set up two of those great bones of the whale, which are not unfrequently seen in maritime districts. Johnson expressed great horror at the sight of these bones; and called the people, who could use such relics of mortality as an ornament, mere savages. CROKER.
[503] In like manner Boswell wrote:—'It is divinely cheering to me to think that there is a Cathedral so near Auchinleck [as Carlisle].' Ante, iii. 416.
[504] 'It is not only in Rasay that the chapel is unroofed and useless; through the few islands which we visited we neither saw nor heard of any house of prayer, except in Sky, that was not in ruins. The malignant influence of Calvinism has blasted ceremony and decency together... It has been 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.' Johnson's Works, ix. 61. He wrote to Mrs. Thrale:—'By the active zeal of Protestant devotion almost all the chapels have sunk into ruin.' Piozzi Letters, i. 152.
[505] 'Not many years ago,' writes Johnson, 'the late Laird led out one hundred men upon a military expedition.' Works, ix. 59. What the expedition was he is careful not to state.
[506] 'I considered this rugged ascent as the consequence of a form of life inured to hardships, and therefore not studious of nice accommodations. But I know not whether for many ages it was not considered as a part of military policy to keep the country not easily accessible. The rocks are natural fortifications.' Johnson's Works, ix. p. 54.
[507] See post Sept. 17.