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honour."^[1] In fact, he rarely introduces in his narrative any living person but in way of compliment or acknowledgment. "He speaks ill of nobody but Ossian," said Lord Mansfield, Scotchman though he was.^[2] "There has been of late," he once said, "a strange turn in travellers to be displeased."^[3] There was no such turn in him. From the beginning to the end of his narrative there is not a single grumble. In Mull last summer I had the pleasure of meeting an old general, a Highlander, who had seen a great deal of rough service in the East Indies. Someone in the company let drop an unfavourable remark on Johnson. "I lately read his Journey," the general replied, "and when I thought of his age, his weak health, and the rudeness of the accommodation in those old days, I was astonished at finding that he never complained." In his food he had a relish for what was nice and delicate. Yet he records that "he only twice found any reason to complain of a Scottish table. He that shall complain of his fare in the Hebrides has improved his delicacy more than his manhood."^[4] "If an epicure," he says in another passage, "could remove by a wish in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland."^[5] Boswell, we read, "was made uneasy and almost fretful" by their bad accommodation in the miserable inn at Glenelg. "Dr. Johnson was calm. I said he was so from vanity. Johnson. 'No, Sir, it is from philosophy.'"^[6] The same philosophy accompanied him not only through his journey, but through his letters and his narrative. Nearly five weeks after he had left Edinburgh he wrote to Mrs. Thrale: "The hill Rattiken and the inn at Glenelg were the only things of which we or travellers yet more delicate could find any pretensions to complain."^[7] Yet he was by no means free from bodily troubles, as his letters show. He was "miserably deaf," he wrote at one time, and was still suffering from the remains of inflammation in the eye, he wrote at another time. His nerves seemed to be growing weaker. The climate, he thought, "perhaps not within his degree of healthy latitude."^[8] The climate, indeed, had been at its worst. In all September he had only one day and a half of fair weather, and in October perhaps not more.^[9] Kept indoors as he was by the rain, he often suffered under the additional discomfort of bad accommo-

1. Works, p. 63.
2. Boswell's Johnson, ii. 318.
3. Ib. iii. 236.
4. Works, ix. 19, 51
5. Ib. p. 52.
6. Boswell's Johnson, v. 146.
7. Piozzi Letters, i. 137.
8. Ib. pp. 127, 165.
9. Ib. p. 182.