o write to Lord Hailes, knowing full well how the
report of such an acquaintance and friendship would be welcome at
Auchinleck as the signs of an approaching reformation. Goldsmith, whom
he met shortly after, he entertained at the Mitre with a party of
friends, among whom was the Rev. Dr John Ogilvie, the author of some
portentous and completely forgotten epics, but who is not yet quite lost
to sight as the writer of the sixty-second paraphrase of Scripture, 'Lo!
in the last of days behold.' A subsequent 'evening by ourselves' he
describes to Lord Hailes in the wariest manner, so as to secure his
father's consent to a plan of travel. The old judge had wished his son
to follow the profession of law which had now in their family become
quite hereditary, and had coupled this with a scheme of study at
Utrecht, after the plan he had himself followed at Leyden. A compromise
had, in fact, been arranged by which this was to be pursued, and the
career of arms dropped. Nothing can be more adroit than the way in which
the young hopeful about to embark on the grand tour manages in his
despatch to his lordship, with an eye to the Home Office, to suggest the
furtherance of his own ideas under the supposed guise of Johnson's
approval. 'He advises me to combat idleness as a distemper, to read five
hours every day, but to let inclination direct me what to read. He is a
great enemy to a stated plan of study. He advises me when abroad to go
to places where there is most to be seen and learned. He is not very
fond of the notion of spending a whole winter in a Dutch town. He thinks
I may do much more by private study than by attending lectures. He would
have me to perambulate (a word in his own style) Spain, also to visit
the northern kingdoms, where more that is new is to be seen than in
France or Italy, but he is not against me seeing these warmer regions.'

Here, in fact, is the germ of the tour to the Baltic they had hoped when
at Dunvegan one day to carry out, for which Johnson, when in his
sixty-eighth year was still ready, and which Boswell thought would have
made them acquainted with the King of Sweden, and the Empress of Russia.
On a later day of the month he asked his friend to the Mitre to meet his
uncle Dr John, 'an elegant scholar and a physician bred in the School of
Boerhaave,' and George Dempster, M.P. for the Forfar Burghs. As the
latter was infected with the sceptical views of Hume, there would seem
to have been a scene, fo