We then conducted him down the Post-house stairs, Parliament-close, and made him look up from the Cow-gate to the highest building in Edinburgh, (from which he had just descended,) being thirteen floors or stories from the ground upon the back elevation; the front wall being built upon the edge of the hill, and the back wall rising from the bottom of the hill several stories before it comes to a level with the front wall.  We proceeded to the College, with the Principal at our head.  Dr. Adam Fergusson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society[107] gives him a respectable place in the ranks of literature, was with us.  As the College buildings[108] are indeed very mean, the Principal said to Dr. Johnson, that he must give them the same epithet that a Jesuit did when shewing a poor college abroad:  ‘Hae miseriae nostrae.’  Dr. Johnson was, however, much pleased with the library, and with the conversation of Dr. James Robertson, Professor of Oriental Languages, the Librarian.  We talked of Kennicot’s edition of the Hebrew Bible[109], and hoped it would be quite faithful.  JOHNSON.  ’Sir, I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit, as poisoning the sources of eternal truth.’

I pointed out to him where there formerly stood an old wall enclosing part of the college, which I remember bulged out in a threatening manner, and of which there was a common tradition similar to that concerning Bacon’s study at Oxford, that it would fall upon some very learned man[110].  It had some time before this been taken down, that the street might be widened, and a more convenient wall built.  Dr. Johnson, glad of an opportunity to have a pleasant hit at Scottish learning, said, ‘they have been afraid it never would fall.’

We shewed him the Royal Infirmary, for which, and for every other exertion of generous publick spirit in his power, that noble-minded citizen of Edinburgh, George Drummond, will be ever held in honourable remembrance.  And we were too proud not to carry him to the Abbey of Holyrood-house, that beautiful piece of architecture, but, alas! that deserted mansion of royalty, which Hamilton of Bangour, in one of his elegant poems, calls

     ‘A virtuous palace, where no monarch dwells[111].’

I was much entertained while Principal Robertson fluently harangued to Dr. Johnson, upon the spot, concerning scenes of his celebrated History of Scotland.  We surveyed that part of the palace appropriated to the Duke of Hamilton, as Keeper, in which our beautiful Queen Mary lived, and in which David Rizzio was murdered; and also the State Rooms.  Dr. Johnson was a great reciter of all sorts of things serious or comical.  I overheard him repeating here in a kind of muttering tone, a line of the old ballad, Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night: 

     ‘And ran him through the fair body[112]!’