[226] There were several points of similarity between them; learning, clearness of head, precision of speech, and a love of research on many subjects which people in general do not investigate.  Foote paid Lord Monboddo the compliment of saying, that he was an Elzevir edition of Johnson.

It has been shrewdly observed that Foote must have meant a diminutive, or pocket edition.  BOSWELL.  The latter part of this note is not in the first edition.

[227] Lord Elibank (post, Sept. 12) said that he would go five hundred miles to see Dr. Johnson; but Johnson never said more than he meant.

[228] Works, ix. 10.  Of the road to Montrose he remarks:—­’When I had proceeded thus far I had opportunities of observing, what I had never heard, that there were many beggars in Scotland.  In Edinburgh the the proportion is, I think, not less than in London, and in the smaller places it is far greater than in English towns of the same extent.  It must, however, be allowed that they are not importunate, nor clamorous.  They solicit silently, or very modestly.’ Ib. p. 9.  See post, p. 116, note 2.

[229] James Mill was born on April 6, 1773, at Northwater Bridge, parish of Logie Pert, Forfar.  The bridge was ’on the great central line of communication from the north of Scotland.  The hamlet is right and left of the 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.