[352] ‘Let us not,’ he says, ’make too much haste to despise our neighbours.  Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation.  It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence.’ Works, ix. 20.

[353] Note by Lord Hailes.  ’The cathedral of Elgin was burnt by the Lord of Badenoch, because the Bishop of Moray had pronounced an award not to his liking.  The indemnification that the see obtained was, that the Lord of Badenoch stood for three days bare-footed at the great gate of the cathedral.  The story is in the Chartulary of Elgin.’  BOSWELL.  The cathedral was rebuilt in 1407-20, but the lead was stripped from the roof by the Regent Murray, and the building went to ruin.  Murray’s Handbook, ed. 1867, p. 303.  ‘There is,’ writes Johnson (Works, ix. 20), ’still extant in the books of the council an order ... directing that the lead, which covers the two cathedrals of Elgin and Aberdeen, shall be taken away, and converted into money for the support of the army....  The two churches were stripped, and the lead was shipped to be sold in Holland.  I hope every reader will rejoice that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea.’  On this Horace Walpole remarks (Letters, vii. 484):—­’I confess I have not quite so heinous an idea of sacrilege as Dr. Johnson.  Of all kinds of robbery, that appears to me the lightest species which injures nobody.  Dr. Johnson is so pious that in his journey to your country he flatters himself that all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church.’

[354] I am not sure whether the Duke was at home.  But, not having the honour of being much known to his grace, I could not have presumed to enter his castle, though to introduce even so celebrated a stranger.  We were at any rate in a hurry to get forward to the wildness which we came to see.  Perhaps, if this noble family had still preserved that sequestered magnificence which they maintained when catholicks, corresponding with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, we might have been induced to have procured proper letters of introduction, and devoted some time to the contemplation of venerable superstitious state.  BOSWELL.  Burnet (History of his own Times, ii. 443, and iii. 23) mentions the Duke of Gordon, a papist, as holding Edinburgh Castle for James II. in 1689.

[355] ’In the way, we saw for the first time some houses with fruit-trees about them.  The improvements of the Scotch are for immediate profit; they do not yet think it quite worth their while to plant what will not produce something to be eaten or sold in a very little time.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 121.

[356] ’This was the first time, and except one the last, that I found any reason to complain of a Scottish table.’  Johnson’s Works, ix. 19.

[357] The following year Johnson told Hannah More that ’when he and Boswell stopt a night at the spot (as they imagined) where the Weird Sisters appeared to Macbeth, the idea so worked upon their enthusiasm, that it quite deprived them of rest.  However they learnt the next morning, to their mortification, that they had been deceived, and were quite in another part of the country’ H. More’s Memoirs, i. 50.