domestick business or pleasure, has yet found time
to make improvements in his patrimony. He has built a house of hewn
stone, very stately, and durable, and has advanced the value of his lands
with great tenderness to his tenants.

I was, however, less delighted with the elegance of the modern mansion,
than with the sullen dignity of the old castle. I clambered with Mr.
Boswell among the ruins, which afford striking images of ancient life. It
is, like other castles, built upon a point of rock, and was, I believe,
anciently surrounded with a moat. There is another rock near it, to
which the drawbridge, when it was let down, is said to have reached.
Here, in the ages of tumult and rapine, the Laird was surprised and
killed by the neighbouring Chief, who perhaps might have extinguished the
family, had he not in a few days been seized and hanged, together with
his sons, by Douglas, who came with his forces to the relief of
Auchinleck.

At no great distance from the house runs a pleasing brook, by a red rock,
out of which has been hewn a very agreeable and commodious summer-house,
at less expence, as Lord Auchinleck told me, than would have been
required to build a room of the same dimensions. The rock seems to have
no more dampness than any other wall. Such opportunities of variety it
is judicious not to neglect.

We now returned to Edinburgh, where I passed some days with men of
learning, whose names want no advancement from my commemoration, or with
women of elegance, which perhaps disclaims a pedant's praise.

The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the
English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to
become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves. The
great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the
English phrase, and the English pronunciation, and in splendid companies
Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old Lady.

There is one subject of philosophical curiosity to be found in Edinburgh,
which no other city has to shew; a college of the deaf and dumb, who are
taught to speak, to read, to write, and to practice arithmetick, by a
gentleman, whose name is Braidwood. The number which attends him is, I
think, about twelve, which he brings together into a little school, and
instructs according to their several degrees of proficiency.

I do not mean to mention the instruction of the deaf as new. Having been