His prejudice against Scotland[34] was announced almost as soon as he began to appear in the world of Letters.  In his London, a poem, are the following nervous lines:—­

     ’For who would leave, unbrib’d, Hibernia’s land? 
      Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand? 
      There none are swept by sudden fate away;
      But all, whom hunger spares, with age decay.’

The truth is, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, he allowed himself to look upon all nations but his own as barbarians[35]:  not only Hibernia, and Scotland, but Spain, Italy, and France, are attacked in the same poem.  If he was particularly prejudiced against the Scots, it was because they were more in his way; because he thought their success in England rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit; and because he could not but see in them that nationality which I believe no liberal-minded Scotsman will deny.  He was indeed, if I may be allowed the phrase, at bottom much of a John Bull[36]; much of a blunt true born Englishman[37].  There was a stratum of common clay under the rock of marble.  He was voraciously fond of good eating[38]; and he had a great deal of that quality called humour, which gives an oiliness and a gloss to every other quality.

I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world.—­In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love ’every kindred and tongue and people and nation[39].’  I subscribe to what my late truly learned and philosophical friend Mr. Crosbie[40] said, that the English are better animals than the Scots; they are nearer the sun; their blood is richer, and more mellow:  but when I humour any of them in an outrageous contempt of Scotland, I fairly own I treat them as children.  And thus I have, at some moments, found myself obliged to treat even Dr. Johnson.

To Scotland however he ventured; and he returned from it in great good humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated; as is evident from that admirable work, his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which, to my utter astonishment, has been misapprehended, even to rancour, by many of my countrymen.  To have the company of Chambers and Scott, he delayed his journey so long, that the court of session, which rises on the eleventh of August, was broke up before he got to Edinburgh[41].

On Saturday the fourteenth of August, 1773, late in the evening, I received a note from him, that he was arrived at Boyd’s inn[42], at the head of the Canongate.  I went to him directly.  He embraced me cordially; and I exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually in Caledonia.  Mr. Scott’s amiable manners, and attachment to our Socrates, at once united me to him.  He told me that, before I came in, the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen