ount Cenis carried the permission mountains have of
being frightful rather too far, and Wordsworth and Shelley would have
resented the Johnsonian description of a Highland Ben as 'a considerable
protuberance.' Indeed, Goldsmith's bare mention of that object, so dear
to Pope and his century,--'grottoes'--reminds us we are not yet in the
modern world. Yet the boldness of the sage, and the cheerfulness of
Boswell, carried them through it all. 'I should,' wrote the doctor to
Mrs Thrale, 'have been very sorry to have missed any of the
inconveniences, to have had more light or less rain, for their
co-operation crowded the scene and filled the mind.'

Crossing the Firth, after landing on Inchkeith, they arrived at St
Andrews which had long been an object of interest to Johnson. They
passed Leuchars, Dundee, and Aberbrothick. The ruins of ecclesiastical
magnificence would seem to have touched a hidden chord in Boswell's
past, for we find him on the road talking of the 'Roman Catholick
faith,' and leading his companion on transubstantiation; but this, being
'an awful subject, I did not then press Dr Johnson upon it.' Montrose
was reached, and at the inn the waiter was called 'rascal' by the
Rambler for putting sugar into the lemonade with his fingers, to the
delight of Bozzy who rallied him into quietness by the assurance that
the landlord was an Englishman. Monboddo was then passed, where 'the
magnetism of his conversation drew us out of our way,' though the prompt
action of Boswell as agent in advance really was the source of their
invitation. Burnet was one of the best scholars in Scotland, and
'Johnson and my lord spoke highly of Homer.' All his paradoxes about the
superiority of the ancients, the existence of men with tails, slavery
and other institutions were vented, but all went well. The decrease of
learning in England, which Johnson lamented, was met by Monboddo's
belief in its extinction in Scotland, but Bozzy, as the old High School
of Edinburgh boy, put in a word for that place of education and brought
him to confess that it did well.

The New Inn at Aberdeen was full. But the waiter knew Boswell by his
likeness to his father who put up here on circuit--the only portrait, we
believe, there is of Lord Auchinleck--and accommodation was provided.
They visited King's College, where Boswell 'stepped into the chapel and
looked at the tomb of its founder, Bishop Elphinstone, of whom I shall
have occasion to write in my his