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Rh same severe ecclesiastical discipline as the workhouse. There the first failure to attend Divine worship was to be followed by the loss of the next meal, while for the second failure the culprit was "to be denied victuals for a whole day."

The last sight which Johnson was shown in his "running about Edinburgh" was the Abbey of Holyrood House, "that deserted mansion of royalty," as Boswell calls it with a sigh. It was more the absence of a charwoman than of a king that was likely to rouse the regrets of an Englishman. "The stately rooms," wrote Wesley, "are dirty as stables." Even the chapel was in a state of "miserable neglect." It was in Holyrood that Robertson "fluently harangued" on the scenes of Scottish history. In the room in which David Rizzio was murdered "Johnson was overheard repeating in a kind of muttering tone, a line of the old ballad, Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night:

The mood in which he was when he made so odd a quotation was perhaps no less natural than Burns's when he wrote:

"With awe-struck thought and pitying tears, I view that noble, stately dome, Where Scotia's kings of other years Famed heroes, had their royal home."

The Castle, that "rough, rude fortress," was not visited by Johnson till his return in November. He owned that it was "a great place;" yet a few days after "he affected to despise it, when Lord Elibank was talking of it with the natural elation of a Scotchman. "It would," he said, "make a good prison in England." Perhaps there was not so much affectation as Boswell thought, for Johnson believed, he said, that the ruins of some one of the castles which the English built in Wales would supply materials for all those which he saw beyond the Tweed.

On the morning of Wednesday, August 18th, the travellers, accompanied by Mr. Nairne, an advocate, set out on their northern