The room where we lay was a celebrated one.  Dr. Johnson’s bed was the very bed in which the grandson of the unfortunate King James the Second[543] lay, on one of the nights after the failure of his rash attempt in 1745-6, while he was eluding the pursuit of the emissaries of government, which had offered thirty thousand pounds as a reward for apprehending him.  To see Dr. Samuel Johnson lying in that bed, in the isle of Sky, in the house of Miss Flora Macdonald, struck me with such a group of ideas as it is not easy for words to describe, as they passed through the mind.  He smiled, and said, ’I have had no ambitious thoughts in it[544].’  The room was decorated with a great variety of maps and prints.  Among others, was Hogarth’s print of Wilkes grinning, with a cap of liberty on a pole by him.  That too was a curious circumstance in the scene this morning; such a contrast was Wilkes to the above groupe.  It reminded me of Sir William Chambers’s Account of Oriental Gardening[545], in which we are told all odd, strange, ugly, and even terrible objects, are introduced for the sake of variety; a wild extravagance of taste which is so well ridiculed in the celebrated Epistle to him[546].  The following lines of that poem immediately occurred to me;

     ’Here too, O king of vengeance! in thy fane,
      Tremendous Wilkes shall rattle his gold chain[547].’

Upon the table in our room I found in the morning a slip of paper, on which Dr. Johnson had written with his pencil these words,

     ‘Quantum cedat virtutibus aurum[548].’

What he meant by writing them I could not tell[549].  He had caught cold a day or two ago, and the rain yesterday having made it worse, he was become very deaf.  At breakfast he said, he would have given a good deal rather than not have lain in that bed.  I owned he was the lucky man; and observed, that without doubt it had been contrived between Mrs. Macdonald and him.  She seemed to acquiesce; adding, ’You know young bucks are always favourites of the ladies.’  He spoke of Prince Charles being here, and asked Mrs. Macdonald, ’Who was with him?  We were told, madam, in England, there was one Miss Flora Macdonald with him.’  She said, ‘they were very right;’ and perceiving Dr. Johnson’s curiosity, though he had delicacy enough not to question her, very obligingly entertained him with a recital of the particulars which she herself knew of that escape, which does so much honour to the humanity, fidelity, and generosity of the Highlanders.  Dr. Johnson listened to her with placid attention, and said, ‘All this should be written down.’

From what she told us, and from what I was told by others personally concerned, and from a paper of information which Rasay was so good as to send me, at my desire, I have compiled the following abstract, which, as it contains some curious anecdotes, will, I imagine, not be uninteresting to my readers, and even, perhaps, be of some use to future historians.