Boswell has very handsome and spacious rooms, level with the ground, on one side of the house, and, on the other, four stories high.

At dinner, on Monday, were the dutchess of Douglas, an old lady, who talks broad Scotch with a paralytick voice, and is scarcely understood by her own countrymen; the lord chief baron, sir Adolphus Oughton, and many more.  At supper there was such a conflux of company, that I could scarcely support the tumult.  I have never been well in the whole journey, and am very easily disordered.

This morning I saw, at breakfast, Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, who does not remember to have seen light, and is read to, by a poor scholar, in Latin, Greek, and French.  He was, originally, a poor scholar himself.  I looked on him with reverence.  Tomorrow our journey begins; I know not when I shall write again.  I am but poorly.  I am, &c.

XVIII.—­To MRS. THRALE.

Bamff, August 25, 1773.

Dear Madam,—­It has so happened, that, though I am perpetually thinking on you, I could seldom find opportunity to write; I have, in fourteen days, sent only one letter; you must consider the fatigues of travel, and the difficulties encountered in a strange country.

August 18th.  I passed, with Boswell, the frith of Forth, and began our journey; in the passage we observed an island, which I persuaded my companions to survey.  We found it a rock somewhat troublesome to climb, about a mile long, and half a mile broad; in the middle were the ruins of an old fort, which had, on one of the stones,—­“Maria Re. 1564.”  It had been only a blockhouse, one story high.  I measured two apartments, of which the walls were entire, and found them twenty-seven feet long, and twenty-three broad.  The rock had some grass and many thistles; both cows and sheep were grazing.  There was a spring of water.  The name is Inchkeith.  Look on your maps.  This visit took about an hour.  We pleased ourselves with being in a country all our own, and then went back to the boat, and landed at Kinghorn, a mean town; and, travelling through Kirkaldie, a very long town, meanly built, and Cowpar, which I could not see, because it was night, we came late to St. Andrew’s, the most ancient of the Scotch universities, and once the see of the primate of Scotland.  The inn was full; but lodgings were provided for us at the house of the professor of rhetorick, a man of elegant manners, who showed us, in the morning, the poor remains of a stately cathedral, demolished in Knox’s reformation, and now only to be imagined, by tracing its foundation, and contemplating the little ruins that are left.  Here was once a religious house.  Two of the vaults or cellars of the sub-prior are even yet entire.  In one of them lives an old woman, who claims an hereditary residence in it, boasting that her husband was the sixth tenant of this gloomy mansion, in a lineal descent, and claims, by her marriage with this lord of the