he was inclined "to expatiate rather too strongly upon the benefits derived to their country from the Union."[1] "'We have taught you,' said he, 'and we'll do the same in time to all barbarous nations, to the Cherokees, and at last to the Ouran-Outangs,' laughing with as much glee as if Monboddo had been present. Boswell. 'We had wine before the Union.' Johnson. 'No, Sir; you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not make you drunk.' Boswell. 'I assure you, Sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness.' Johnson. 'No, Sir; there were people who died of dropsies, which they contracted in trying to get drunk.'"[2]
Such pleasantry as this could hardly have given offence to anyone into whose skull a jest could penetrate by any operation short of a surgical one. But it was a very different matter when the spoken jest passed into a serious expression of opinion in print. All the theoretic philosophy of which Scotland justly boasts was hardly sufficient to support with patience such a passage as the following: "Till the Union made the Scots acquainted with English manners the culture of their lands was unskilful, and their domestic life unformed; their tables were coarse as the feasts of Esquimaux, and their houses filthy as the cottages of Hottentots."[3] His attacks on the Highlanders would have been read with patience, if not with pleasure, in Lowland circles. "His account of the Isles," wrote Beattie, "is, I dare say, very just. I never was there."[4] These were not the "asperities" of which that amiable poet complained. Yet they were asperities which might have provoked an incensed Highlander to give the author "a crack on his skull," had he looked not to the general tenour of the narrative, but to a few rough passages scattered up and down. McNicol would surely have roused the anger of his countrymen to a fiercer heat had he forborne to falsify Johnson's words, and strung together instead a row of his sarcastic sayings. The offensive passages are not indeed numerous, but out of such a collection as the following irritation enough might have been provided: "the genuine improvidence of savages;"[5] "a muddy mixture of pride and ignorance;"[6] "the chiefs gradually degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapa-
- ↑ Boswell's Johnson, v. 128.
- ↑ Ib. v. 248.
- ↑ Works, ix. 24. Hottentot—"a respectable Hottentot"—was the term which for more than a hundred years was supposed to have been applied to Johnson by Lord Chesterfield. I have proved, however, that it was not Johnson, hut the first Lord Lyttelton who was meant. See my Dr. Johnson: His Friends and his Critics, p. 214, and my edition of Boswell's Johnson, i. 267.
- ↑ Forbes's Life of Beattie, p. 217.
- ↑ Works, ix. 76.
- ↑ Ib. p. 86.
