have been over a wild country, for a few years earlier, in his "Instructions" for his friend Temple on his tour to Auchinleck, he writes: "Set out [from Glasgow] for Kingswell, to which you have a good road; arrived there, get a guide to put you through the muir to Loudoun."[1] He and Johnson did not go the whole distance in one day, though they had but thirty-four miles to travel. They broke their journey at the house of Mr. Campbell, of Treesbank, who had married Mrs. Boswell's sister. Here they rested till Tuesday. At a few miles distance Robert Burns, a lad of thirteen, "a dexterous ploughman for his age," was spending his boyhood "in unceasing moil" and hardship, not having as yet "committed the sin of rhyme." Boswell, I believe, much as he admired Allan Ramsay's poem in the Scottish dialect, The Gentle
DUNDONALD CASTLE.
Shepherd, never makes mention of Burns, and Burns only once mentions him. In the Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer, written before the year 1786, he says:
Dundonald Castle, in which Robert II. lived and died, our travellers visited on Monday morning. "It has long been unroofed," writes Boswell, "and though of considerable size we could not by any power of imagination, figure it as having been a suitable habitation for majesty. Dr. Johnson, to irritate my old Scottish enthusiasm,
