Flora Macdonald, who conducted the Prince, dressed as her maid, through the English forces, from the island of Lewis; and when she came to Skye, dined with the English officers, and left her maid below. She must then have been a very young lady—she is now not old—of a pleasing person and elegant behaviour. She told me that she thought herself honoured by my visit; and I am sure that whatever regard she bestowed on me was liberally repaid." Boswell describes her as "a little woman of a genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well-bred. To see Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great champion of the English Tories, salute Miss Flora Macdonald in the Isle of Skye was a striking sight." By salute I have little doubt that both Boswell and Johnson meant kiss. Johnson in his Dictionary gives it as the third meaning of the word, though he cites no authority for the usage. "The Scotch," wrote Topham in 1774, "have still the custom of salutation on introduction to strangers. It very seldom happens that the salute is a voluntary one, and it frequently is the cause of disgust and embarrassment to the fair sex."[1] By the uncouth appearance ot the man who thus saluted her, Flora Macdonald might with good reason have been astonished, for "the news had reached her that Mr. Boswell was coming to Skye, and one Mr. Johnson, a young English buck, with him." Her husband, "a large stately man, with a steady, sensible countenance," who was going to try his fortune in America, was perhaps for that reason the more careless of obeying the laws of the country he was leaving. This evening he wore the Highland costume. "He had his tartan plaid thrown about him, a large blue bonnet with a knot of black riband like a cockade, a brown short coat of a kind of duffil, a tartan waist-coat with gold buttons and gold button-holes, a bluish philibeg, and tartan hose." The bed-curtains of the room in which our travellers slept were also of tartan. Johnson's bed had whatever fame could attach to it through its having been occupied for one night "by the grandson of the unfortunate King James the Second," to borrow Boswell's description of him. The grandson, before many years passed over his head, proved not unworthy of the grandfather—equally mean and equally selfish. The happy failure of the rebels hindered him from displaying his vices, with a kingdom for his stage. His worthlessness, which though it might have been suspected from his stock, could not have been known in his youth,
- ↑ Letters from Edinburgh, pp. 33, 37.
