the example of the ancients. In an age when bathing was very uncommon even among the wealthy, he constantly urged the daily use of the cold bath. He reminded "our fine gentlemen and ladies that the Otaheite man, Omai, who came from a country where the inhabitants bathed twice a day," complained of the offensive smell of all the people of England.[1] It was believed, however, that Monboddo impaired the health of his children by the hardy treatment to which he exposed them. He despised Johnson because "he had compiled a dictionary of a barbarous language, a work which a man of real genius rather than undertake would choose to die of hunger."[2] In the latter part of his life he used every year to pay a visit to London, and he always went on horseback, even after he had passed his eightieth year "A carriage, a vehicle that was not in common use among the ancients, he considered as an engine of effeminacy and sloth. To be dragged at the tail of horses seemed in his eyes to be a ludicrous degradation of the genuine dignity of human nature. In Court he never sat on the Bench with the other judges, but within the Bar, on the seat appropriated for Peers."[3] Yet with all his singularities he was a fine old fellow. There was no kinder landlord in all Scotland. While around him the small farms were disappearing, and farmers and cottagers were making room for sheep, it was his boast that on his estate no change had been made. Neither he nor his father before him had ever turned off a single cottager.
"One of my tenants (he wrote) who pays me no more than £30 of rent has no less than thirteen cottagers living upon his farm. I have on one part of my estate seven tenants, each of whom possesses no more than three acres of arable land, and some moorish land for pasture, and they pay me no more than twelve shillings for each acre, and nothing for the moor. I am persuaded I could more than double the rent of their land by letting it off to one tenant; but I should be sorry to increase my rent by depopulating any part of the country; and I keep these small tenants as a monument of the way in which I believe a great part of the Lowlands was cultivated in ancient times."[4]
He befriended Burns, who repaid his kindness by celebrating his daughter's beauty in his Address to Edinburgh, and by the elegy which he wrote on her untimely death. In a note to Guy Mannering Sir Walter Scott describes his supper parties, "where there was a circulation of excellent Bordeaux in flasks garlanded with roses, which were also strewed on the table after the manner
