against the grain with me to make a mixture of that sort. The plan which I have pursued has been much more laborious; but it will, I trust, commend itself both to "the gentle reader"—who is, I take it, a somewhat indolent reader—and also to the student of the manners and customs of a past age. Of all history there was no part which Johnson held equal in value to the history of manners. With this judgment my own taste leads me to agree. I take far greater interest in the daily life, the briars and roses of the working-day world as it was known to our forefathers, than in all the conquests of Chatham and of Clive. I have made, therefore, the attempt to bring before my readers the Scotland which Johnson saw, the Scotland which he had expressly come to study. "The wild objects" which he said he wished to see I have not neglected, but here I trust chiefly to Mr. Speed's art. "The peculiar manners" which interested him far more than natural objects have been my special study. Even before I took the present work in hand I had examined them somewhat closely; but last summer, on my return from Scotland, in a quiet recess of the Bodleian Library, I carried my inquiries a good deal farther. In covering so large an extent of ground and in such a mass of details it is idle to hope that no error has been made. I can honestly say that I have done my best to be accurate.
The country which Johnson traversed is famous for other footsteps besides his. I have called in the earlier and later travellers to add interest to the scene, and I have thrown in anecdotes with a liberal hand. "I love anecdotes," he said. To Boswell's descriptions of the men with whom he associated I have often been able to add a great deal from memoirs and other books to which that writer had not access; I have gathered some few traditions of the Sassenach mohr, the big Englishman, which still linger in the Highlands and the Hebrides.
The tour in which I followed his course I was forced to divide into two parts. Beginning at Inverness I went first through the Western Highlands and the Hebrides, and so southwards through Glasgow to Auchinleck, Boswell's home in Ayrshire. Later on I visited Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, and completed my task by going northwards to Inverness. I mention this to guard against any apparent inaccuracy in dates which might be discovered in my narrative. I cannot pretend to have seen every place which Johnson saw; but those spots which I passed by are few in
