EARLY HIGHLAND TOURISTS 121 



Eight years after Gray's visit, Samuel Johnson in 

 1773 made his more adventurous journey to the 

 Hebrides. When we consider what were the discom- 

 forts, and sometimes the actual dangers which he had 

 to undergo, we cannot but admire the quiet courage 

 with which he endured them, and the reticence with 

 which he refers to them in his narrative. But Johnson 

 could see no charm in the Highland mountains. In his 

 poem on London he had asked many years before: 



'For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's land, 

 Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?' 



Yet when at last he set foot in Scotland, he showed 

 no disposition to prefer its rocks to his haunts in 

 London. Travelling through some of the finest 

 scenery in Western Inverness-shire, this is the language 

 he uses regarding it : c The hills exhibit very little 

 variety ; being almost wholly covered with dark heath, 

 and even that seems to be checked in its growth. 

 What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified 

 by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. 

 An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving 

 harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide 

 extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that 



monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with 

 so much horror. A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and 

 clergymen, that have not been among them, their imagination can 

 be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse- 

 ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes, and Chinese rails. Then I had 

 so beautiful an autumn ; Italy could hardly produce a nobler scene, 

 and this so sweetly contrasted with that perfection of nastiness and 

 total want of accommodation, that Scotland only can supply.' 

 Gray's Works, edit. E. Gosse, vol. iii. p. 223. 



