for delivering a discourse which was too high-flown and poetical. "Lord help him, poor man!" said the indignant youngster, "He knows no better."[1] On the second day of our travellers' stay "they went," says Boswell, "and saw Colonel Nairne's garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree.[2] Unluckily the Colonel said there was but this and another large tree in the country.[3] This assertion was an
St. Mary's College Library.
excellent cue for Dr. Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it." The Colonel's father, Lord Nairne, had been "out in the '45," while the son, who fought in the King's army, had been sent to batter down the old castle of his forefathers. George II. wished to reward his fidelity with the command of a regiment, but
- ↑ Scotland and Scotchmen in the Eighteenth Century, i. 269, 547. The youngster was Jerome Stone, the author of a poem called Albin and the Daughter of Mey, mentioned by Boswell in his Life of Johnson, v. 171.
- ↑ It was probably a sycamore, for, as was pointed out by a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1837, p. 343, what the Scotch call sycamores we call planes.
- ↑ The other tree, according to Sir Walter Scott, was probably the Prior Letham plane, measuring about twenty feet round. It stood in a cold exposed situation apart from every other tree. Croker's Boswell, p. 286.
