What do you think, mon?  He’s done wi’ Paoli—­he’s off wi’ the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican, and who’s tail do you think he’s pinned himself to now, mon?” “Here,” says Sir Walter Scott, the authority for the story, “the old judge summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt.  ’A dominie, mon—­an auld dominie—­he keeped a schule and caauld it an acaademy.’” The two managed to keep the peace till, one day during Johnson’s visit, they got upon Oliver Cromwell.  Boswell suppresses the scene with obvious reluctance, his openness being checked for once by filial respect.  Scott has fortunately preserved the climax of Old Boswell’s argument.  “What had Cromwell done for his country?” asked Johnson.  “God, doctor, he gart Kings ken that they had a lith in their necks” retorted the laird, in a phrase worthy of Mr. Carlyle himself.  Scott reports one other scene, at which respectable commentators, like Croker, hold up their hands in horror.  Should we regret or rejoice to say that it involves an obvious inaccuracy?  The authority, however, is too good to allow us to suppose that it was without some foundation.  Adam Smith, it is said, met Johnson at Glasgow and had an altercation with him about the well-known account of Hume’s death.  As Hume did not die till three years later, there must be some error in this.  The dispute, however, whatever its date or subject, ended by Johnson saying to Smith, “You lie.”  “And what did you reply?” was asked of Smith.  “I said, ‘you are a son of a -----.’” “On such terms,” says Scott, “did these two great moralists meet and part, and such was the classical dialogue between these two great teachers of morality.”

In the year 1774 Boswell found it expedient to atone for his long absence in the previous year by staying at home.  Johnson managed to complete his account of the Scotch Tour, which was published at the end of the year.  Among other consequences was a violent controversy with the lovers of Ossian.  Johnson was a thorough sceptic as to the authenticity of the book.  His scepticism did not repose upon the philological or antiquarian reasonings, which would be applicable in the controversy from internal evidence.  It was to some extent the expression of a general incredulity which astonished his friends, especially when contrasted with his tenderness for many puerile superstitions.  He could scarcely be induced to admit the truth of any narrative which struck him as odd, and it was long, for example, before he would believe even in the Lisbon earthquake.  Yet he seriously discussed the truth of second-sight; he carefully investigated the Cock-lane ghost—­a goblin who anticipated some of the modern phenomena of so-called “spiritualism,” and with almost equal absurdity; he told stories to Boswell about a “shadowy being” which had once been seen by Cave, and declared that he had once heard his mother call “Sam” when he was at Oxford and she at Lichfield.  The apparent inconsistency