high road.' Bain's _Life of James Mill_, p. 1. Boswell and
Johnson, on their road to Laurence Kirk, must have passed close to the
cottage in which he was lying, a baby not five months old.

[230] See _ante_, i. 211.

[231] There is some account of him in Chambers's _Traditions of
Edinburgh_, ed. 1825, ii. 173, and in Dr. A. Carlyle's _Auto._ p. 136.

[232] G. Chalmers (_Life of Ruddiman_, p. 270) says:--'In May, 1790, Lord
Gardenston declared that he still intended to erect a proper monument in
his village to the memory of the late learned and worthy Mr. Ruddiman.'
In 1792 Gardenston, in his _Miscellanies_, p. 257, attacked Ruddiman.
'It has of late become fashionable,' he wrote, 'to speak of Ruddiman in
terms of the highest respect.' The monument was never raised.

[233] _A Letter to the Inhabitants of Laurence Kirk_, by F. Garden.

[234] 'Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have
entertained angels unawares.' _Hebrews_ xiii, 2.

[235] This, I find, is considered as obscure. I suppose Dr. Johnson
meant, that I assiduously and earnestly recommended myself to some of
the members, as in a canvass for an election into parliament. BOSWELL.
See _ante_, ii, 235.

[236] Goldsmith in _Retaliation_, a few months later, wrote of William
Burke:--'Would you ask for his merits? alas! he had none; What was good
was spontaneous, his faults were his own.' See _ante_, iii 362, note 2.

[237] See _ante_, iii. 260, 390, 425.

[238] Hannah More (_Memoirs_, i. 252) wrote of Monboddo in 1782:--'He is
such an extravagant adorer of the ancients, that he scarcely allows the
English language to be capable of any excellence, still less the French.
He said we moderns are entirely degenerated. I asked in what? "In
everything," was his answer. He loves slavery upon principle. I asked
him how he could vindicate such an enormity. He owned it was because
Plutarch justified it. He is so wedded to system that, as Lord
Barrington said to me the other day, rather than sacrifice his favourite
opinion that men were born with tails, he would be contented to wear
one himself.'

[239] Scott, in a note on _Guy Mannering_, ed. 1860, iv. 267, writes of
Monboddo:--'The conversation of the excellent old man, his high,
gentleman-like, chivalrous spirit, the learning and wit with which he
defended his fanciful paradoxes, the kind and liberal spirit of his
hospitality, must render these _noctes coenaeque_ dear to all who, like
the autho