to his room; but she sent us a kind invitation to tea, which we all accepted.  She was the same lively, sensible, cheerful woman as ever.  Dr. Johnson here threw out some jokes against Scotland.  He said, ’You go first to Aberdeen; then to Enbru (the Scottish pronunciation of Edinburgh); then to Newcastle, to be polished by the colliers; then to York; then to London.’  And he laid hold of a little girl, Stuart Dallas, niece to Mrs. Riddoch, and, representing himself as a giant, said, he would take her with him! telling her, in a hollow voice, that he lived in a cave, and had a bed in the rock, and she should have a little bed cut opposite to it!

He thus treated the point, as to prescription of murder in Scotland[272].  ’A jury in England would make allowance for deficiencies of evidence, on account of lapse of time; but a general rule that a crime should not be punished, or tried for the purpose of punishment, after twenty years, is bad.  It is cant to talk of the King’s advocate delaying a prosecution from malice.  How unlikely is it the King’s advocate should have malice against persons who commit murder, or should even know them at all.  If the son of the murdered man should kill the murderer who got off merely by prescription, I would help him to make his escape; though, were I upon his jury, I would not acquit him.  I would not advise him to commit such an act.  On the contrary, I would bid him submit to the determination of society, because a man is bound to submit to the inconveniences of it, as he enjoys the good:  but the young man, though politically wrong, would not be morally wrong.  He would have to say, ’here I am amongst barbarians, who not only refuse to do justice, but encourage the greatest of all crimes.  I am therefore in a state of nature:  for, so far as there is no law, it is a state of nature:  and consequently, upon the eternal and immutable law of justice, which requires that he who sheds man’s blood should have his blood shed[273], I will stab the murderer of my father.’

We went to our inn, and sat quietly.  Dr. Johnson borrowed, at Mr. Riddoch’s, a volume of Massillon’s Discourses on the Psalms:  but I found he read little in it.  Ogden too he sometimes took up, and glanced at; but threw it down again.  I then entered upon religious conversation.  Never did I see him in a better frame:  calm, gentle, wise, holy.  I said, ’Would not the same objection hold against the Trinity as against Transubstantiation?’ ’Yes, (said he,) if you take three and one in the same sense.  If you do so, to be sure you cannot believe it:  but the three persons in the Godhead are Three in one sense, and One in another.  We cannot tell how; and that is the mystery!’