came extremely
obnoxious to government by his zealous personal efforts to engage his
chief Macleod, and Macdonald of Sky, in the Chevalier's attempts of
1745. Had he succeeded, it would have added one third at least to the
Jacobite army. Boswell has oddly described _M'Cruslick_, the being whose
name was conferred upon this gentleman, as something between Proteus and
Don Quixote. It is the name of a species of satyr, or _esprit follet_, a
sort of mountain Puck or hobgoblin, seen among the wilds and mountains,
as the old Highlanders believed, sometimes mirthful, sometimes
mischievous. Alexander Macleod's precarious mode of life and variable
spirits occasioned the _soubriquet_. WALTER SCOTT.

[500] Johnson also complained of the cheese. 'In the islands they do
what I found it not very easy to endure. They pollute the tea-table by
plates piled with large slices of Cheshire cheese, which mingles its
less grateful odours with the fragrance of the tea.' _Works_, ix. 52.

[501] 'The estate has not, during four hundred years, gained or lost a
single acre.' _Ib_. p. 55.

[502] Lord Stowell told me, that on the road from Newcastle to Berwick,
Dr. Johnson and he passed a cottage, at the entrance of which were set
up two of those great bones of the whale, which are not unfrequently
seen in maritime districts. Johnson expressed great horror at the sight
of these bones; and called the people, who could use such relics of
mortality as an ornament, mere savages. CROKER.

[503] In like manner Boswell wrote:--'It is divinely cheering to me to
think that there is a Cathedral so near Auchinleck [as Carlisle].'
_Ante_, iii. 416.

[504] 'It is not only in Rasay that the chapel is unroofed and useless;
through the few islands which we visited we neither saw nor heard of any
house of prayer, except in Sky, that was not in ruins. The malignant
influence of Calvinism has blasted ceremony and decency together... It
has been for many years popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the
Romish clergy; over the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches we
may indulge our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with the
fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall.' Johnson's _Works_,
ix. 61. He wrote to Mrs. Thrale:--'By the active zeal of Protestant
devotion almost all the chapels have sunk into ruin.' _Piozzi
Letters_, i. 152.

[505] 'Not many years ago,' writes Johnson, 'the late Laird led out one
hundred men upon a military exp