summit to the pond, took off the terror of the first prospect."*

All men of action have their special sagacities and prowess. An Orkney cragsman is frightened to descend a stair, and a chamois hunter would be unnerved at a crossing in the Strand. De Foe's courage and wisdom were both exercised on man rather than inanimate nature, and his simplicity about the culmination of a mountain is well compensated by the sagacity contained in the following dream of a New Town of Edinburgh that might have been, and now is: "On the north side of the city is a spacious, rich, and pleasant plain, extending from the Lough which joins the city to the river of Leith, at the mouth of which is the town of Leith, at the distance of a long Scots mile from the city; and even here were not the north side of the hill, which the city stands on, so exceeding steep, as hardly (at least to the westward of their flesh-market) to be clambered up on foot, much less to be made passable for carriages. But, I say, were it not so steep, and were the Lough filled up, as it might easily be, the city might have been extended upon the plain below, and fine beautiful streets would, no doubt, have been built there; nay, I question much whether, in time, the high streets would not have been forsaken, and the city, as we might say, run all out of its gates to the north."

Burt tells a story of a surveyor who had gone to the Highlands, taking his credentials with him as a Government officer, but who found them so little available for his protection that arrangements for putting him to death looked quite serious. In his terror he remembered that a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh had given him a letter of introduction to a local magnate. The production of this brought immediate security and hospitality, with the question, Why the teil he had used that tamned Covernment paper instead of Cousin Lachlan's letter. De Foe found that it would have been useless to go to the Glengary or the Macrae country without the countenance of the chiefs and other local powers. He seems to have made himselt so good a fellow among them indeed, that their hospitalities became rather oppressive to him; and he sketches out a plan for traversing the country, calculated to avoid entire dependence either on the futile resources of public places of entertainment, or on local hospitality. His plan is a delightful one, alive with the spirit of the genuine explorer and lover of nature. He proposes that a small party should organize themselves, and carry tents and baggage with them. It would be madness to attempt this without

He

the countenance of the local magnates, "but if they are first well recommended as strangers, and have letters from one gentleman to another, they would want neither guides nor guards, nor indeed would any man touch them; but rather protect them, if there was occasion, in all places; and by this method they might in the summer-time lodge when and wherever they pleased with safety and pleasure, travelling no farther at a time than they thought fit. And as for their provisions, they might supply themselves with their guns with very great plenty of wild-fowl." knew, indeed, a party of five, "two Scots and three English gentlemen," who had actually carried out an expedition after this fashion into the unknown wilds of the north Highlands, and in a very tantalizing way winds up the affair by saying, "It would be very diverting to show how they lodged every night; how two Highlanders who had been in the army went before every evening and pitched their little camp; how they furnished themselves with provisions, carried some with them, and dressed and prepared what they killed with their guns; and how very easily they travelled over all the mountains and wastes without troubling themselves with houses or lodgings; but, as I say, the particulars are too long for this place."

By the way, this book has an interest for the bibliographer, the bibliomaniac, the bookhunter, or whatever the collector of literary specialties may call himself. In fact, in the eyes of this class it should be invested with a certain romantic interest, for, like the hero of a deep-plotted romance, its position has been claimed in the eye of the world by an impostor, against whom it has been vindicated, with no better fate, after all, than to show that the writer is a spurious De Foe, and that the reality had long been lost sight of in the contest between rival shams. In most good libraries, from sixty to eighty years old, will be found a book, in four small volumes, called The Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain. As a work both popular and useful, it went through many editions. It used to go by the name of De Foe's Tour, and it was not rated as an imposture. It had some title to the name, in as far as it grew out of that book, becoming towards it what a stupidish, plodding, elderly gentleman is to a wild adventurous youth. It became a sort of travellers' guide and statistical companion. It had everything that the sanction of a high name could give to recommend it, for its reconstruction was known to be the work of Samuel Richardson, who went through the ordeal of being the most fashionable novelist

*Tour, iii. 211, 212.

of his day. Still, in later times, the four volumes were looked on rather disdainfully, and collectors preferred the fresh and genuine De Foe. Now, it happened that one John Mackay, unknown to fame, printed, in several editions, the latest of which is dated in 1732, "A Journey through England, in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman here to his Friend Abroad," in two volumes, followed by a third, called "A Journey through Scotland, etc., being the Third Volume, which completes Great Britain." A tacit resolution seems to have been passed in the bookish world to make this personate De Foe's book. Look at the catalogue of any public library, under the name of De Foe, and you will find that the genuine book is carefully distinguished from Richardson's recasting, and when you get your hand on the 'genuine' book, behold it is Mackay's. Go to any vender of old books, and ask if he has De Foe's Tour,"the genuine, mind, not Richardson's," the dealer understands you perfectly; he has the genuine article; he produces the three volumes, and, lo, they are the inevitable Mackay's. The world owes to Mr. Wilson, in his life of De Foe, the exposition of this curious history of a bibliographical changeling.

The best way to enjoy De Foe's Tour is to read it after Johnson's. The true-born Englishman was free from the lexicographer's burden of dictionary words, and his obligation to turn every sentence in his rounding lathe. Going from one to the other, then, is like going from social conventionalism to freedom; it feels as if one were escaping from a highlyserved establishment, with its pomps and ceremonies, its plush and shoulder-knots, and systematic organization for the day's tediousness, and taking to the hill as a wanderer, with the free world before one.

Johnson's coming among us was a great event. It was considered, on the principle of every dog having his day, that Scotland had at last got a turn on the wheel of fortune, and the book that was to come of the strange excursion was waited on with intense anxiety. The author of it could scarcely use his pen without setting down something remarkable and worth reading, and yet his qualifications were as uncongenial to his work as they could well be. He knew a deal of what is told in books, but his knowledge of mankind was limited to "The Town;" and of the world beyond it, he was as ignorant as his own "Rasselas" of everything outside the happy valley. He was, in fact, just a noble specimen of the Cockney. He seems to have expected when he crossed the Tweed, to see something as foreign and strange as if he had gone to Cashmere or Morocco for it. He did find a few patrician courtiers, the inside of

whose dwellings-and that was the only side he cared about-was just the same as those of the English Howards and Wilmots. In the next step of the social scale he found a difference, but not such as he expected or desired, though, had he remembered the political condition of Scotland, and the foreign tendencies of the gentry, he might have expected it. In that range of country life, where at home he could only find Octoberale-drinking, fox-hunting boors, he met with polished gentlemen and accomplished scholars, who had studied at Leyden, Ratisbon, or Douay. The unfortunate politics, and the presence of actual civil war, raised their social position, since their thoughts and their conversation ran on dynasties and foreign alliances, instead of parochial bickerings and disputes about rights of way and swing-gates. In another grade he found, just as at home, pompous, pig-headed professors and frousy country clergymen of the epicurean or the ascetic cast, like the Trullibers and Parson Adamses he had left behind. Most unpleasant of all, there were men whom he did or might meet, whose literary fame was so considerable that it has since eclipsed his own.

The scientific traveller was then becoming common, but Johnson had no science, and when he touched on it he wrote nonsense. He came to the country to condemn it, and he did condemn it. One of his foregone conclusions was that it was a barren treeless tract, and in this he managed somehow to make out his point. It is curious to observe how skilfully he evaded the finest scenery of Scotland. Going northwards, he hugged the sea, as sailors sometimes say of the shore, and thus kept on the bleak coast, swept by east winds, which a Kentucky man is said to have commended as "an almighty clever clearing." When at Aberdeen, if he had chosen to turn the hill, and get into the nearest shelter, he would have found scattered clumps of trees, which, thickening as he went up the Dee, would scarce have deserted him till he found himself in the great forest of Glen Tanner, which, down to recent times, not only sufficed for the shipping in the north-east coast, but gave the port of Aberdeen an export trade in ship-timber. Glen Tanner would have given him shelter till it handed him over to the still wider forest districts of Braemar and Ballochbuie. The trees would disappear as he approached the snows and precipices of the source of the Dee, but on the other side he would find one or two gnarled pines struggling bravely up to the edge of the snow, and these, thickening as he descended, would bring him to the dense forests of Rothiemurchus, Glen More, and Glen Feshie, where Aaron Hill proposed to esta

blish timber-yards and sawpits for the navy. Such would have been the character of his journey had he turned westward. Eastward was a scene of another kind. There spread the broad plains of Buchan, so affluent in sand that the drifts would often cover many an acre, and once desolated a whole parish. Except the few who make a dash at the Bullers, the modern tourist would no more think of penetrating here-though the aspect of the country has brightened with much verdure since Johnson's day-than he would spend a week in the Romney Marsh. The hospitable mansion of Lord Errol seems to have been the direct attraction that led Johnson into this desert, but when he beheld the character of the country so opened to him, he must have felt the joy which brightens in the bosom of the malignant when their worst suspicions about their enemies are confirmed. His next step showed great ingenuity. It was difficult to get through the Highlands without encountering trees; but through the Highlands he would go, so he selected his route through those districts where General Wade, for strategic reasons, had burned the forests, and thus got through uninterrupted to the Hebrides, where, as in Buchan, the watery winds sweep the shore. He was thus enabled conscientiously to say,

"Of the hills, many may be called, with Homer's Ida, abundant in springs; but few can deserve the epithet which he bestowed upon Pelion, of waving their leaves. They exhibit very little variety, being almost wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye ac customed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by the wide extent of hopeless steriliy iy.'

11

Some of the lovers of mountain scenery maintain that it has in it a potency of physical exhilaration, which may impart intellectual enjoyment, but is not under the control of the intellect. They say that a sworn abstainer may as well drink wine and smoke opium experimentally, in the certainty that his hatred of stimulants and narcotics will resist their influence, as a lover of parks and lawns can wander among mountains without feeling them stir his blood; and really Johnson seems to have felt it, despite his prejudices and his resolution to adhere to them, uttered in the preceding and many other passages. In fact, he had broken down, like some surly stoic who determines to resist the influence of a tragedy or a touching romance; and we find him, for one brief moment only however, in this condition:

* Journey, 1st Ed., p. 84.

the Scottish mind was prodigious, and perThe storm which "the journey" raised in haps had its influence on the reaction in favour of the national scenery. An Englishman, named John Topham, was living in Edinburgh when this thunderbolt burst, and has left his account of the scene :—

“EDINBURGH, January 24, 1775.

"Dr. Johnson's account of his tour into Scotland has just made its appearance here, and has put the country into a flame. Everybody finds some reason to be affronted. A thousand people Isles interest themselves in their cause, and are who know not a single creature in the Western offended at the accounts that are given of them. But let this unfortunate writer say what he will, it must be confessed that they return it with interest. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets-all teem with abuse of the Doctor. While one day some very ingenious criticism shows he might have wrote such a thing better, the next others equally ingenious prove he had better never have wrote such a thing at all. In this general uproar, amidst this strife of tongues, it is impossible that a dispassionate man should be heard."t

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highly amusing. He laid himself open to assault by the rash way in which he tilted at everything that did not conform with his own experience and philosophy of high civilisation and culture. For instance, announcing the profound principle that "where there are mountains there are commonly minerals,” he finds that in the Western Highlands mon ores would be here of no great value; for what requires to be separated by fire, must, if it were found, be carried away in its mineral state, here being no fuel for the smelting-house or forge." In strange antithesis to this stands a passage in De Foe, also speculating on the possibility of discovering ore in the Highlands:

"But it seems reserved for a future and more industrious age to search into; which, if it should happen to appear, especially the iron, they would no more have occasion to say that nature furnished them with so much timber and woods of such vast extent to no purpose, seeing it may be all little enough to supply the forges for working up the ironstone, and improving that useful product. And should a time come when these hidden treasures of the earth should

*Journey, 1st edit., pp. 86, 87.

+ Topham's Letters from Edinburgh, p. 137.