[358] See ante, p. 76.

[359] Murphy (Life, p. 145) says that ’his manner of reciting verses was wonderfully impressive.’  According to Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 302), ’whoever once heard him repeat an ode of Horace would be long before they could endure to hear it repeated by another.’

[360] Then pronounced Affleck, though now often pronounced as it is written.  Ante, ii. 413.

[361] At this stage of his journey Johnson recorded:—­’There are more beggars than I have ever seen in England; they beg, if not silently, yet very modestly.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 122.  See ante, p. 75, note 1.

[362] Duncan’s monument; a huge column on the roadside near Fores, more than twenty feet high, erected in commemoration of the final retreat of the Danes from Scotland, and properly called Swene’s Stone.  WALTER SCOTT.

[363] Swift wrote to Pope on May 31, 1737:—­’Pray who is that Mr. Glover, who writ the epick poem called Leonidas, which is reprinting here, and has great vogue?’ Swift’s Works (1803), xx. 121.  ’It passed through four editions in the first year of its publication (1737-8).’  Lowndes’s Bibl.  Man. p. 902.  Horace Walpole, in 1742, mentions Leonidas Glover (Letters, i. 117); and in 1785 Hannah More writes (Memoirs, i. 405):—­’I was much amused with hearing old Leonidas Glover sing his own fine ballad of Hosier’s Ghost, which was very affecting.  He is past eighty [he was seventy-three].  Mr. Walpole coming in just afterwards, I told him how highly I had been pleased.  He begged me to entreat for a repetition of it.  It was the satire conveyed in this little ballad upon the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry which is thought to have been a remote cause of his resignation.  It was a very curious circumstance to see his son listening to the recital of it with so much complacency.’

[364] See ante, i. 125.

[365] See ante, i. 456, and post, Sept. 22.

[366] See ante, ii. 82, and post, Oct. 27.

[367] ’Nairne is the boundary in this direction between the highlands and lowlands; and until within a few years both English and Gaelic were spoken here.  One of James VI.’s witticisms was to boast that in Scotland he had a town “sae lang that the folk at the tae end couldna understand the tongue spoken at the tother."’ Murray’s Handbook for Scotland, ed. 1867, p. 308.  ‘Here,’ writes Johnson (Works, ix. 21), ’I first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse language.’  As he heard the girl singing Erse, so Wordsworth thirty years later heard The Solitary Reaper:—­

’Yon solitary Highland Lass
Reaping and singing by herself.’

[368]

     ’Verse softens toil, however rude the sound;
     She feels no biting pang the while she sings;
     Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around,
     Revolves the sad vicissitude of things.’