Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/170

134 slate. As he had first printed his narrative he had much more closely pointed the attack. It had run as follows: "There is now, as I have heard, a body of men not less decent or virtuous than the Scottish council, longing to melt the lead of an English cathedral. What they shall melt, it were just that they should swallow." Before publication he had the leaf cancelled, from the tender recollection that the dean had done him a kindness about forty years before. "He is now very old, and I am not young. Reproach can do him no good, and in myself I know not whether it is zeal or wantonness."

As I turned away from the ruins with my thoughts full of the past—of the ancient glory of the cathedral, of the strange sights which had been seen from its tower when the Young Pretender's Highlanders hurried by, closely followed by the English army, of old Johnson wandering about in the heavy rain—I was suddenly reminded of the vastness of "the abysm of time" by which they are separated from us, by reading in an advertisement placarded on the walls, that for £3 16s. 5d. could be had a ticket from Elgin to Paris and back.

Leaving Elgin that same afternoon, our travellers drove on to Fores, where they passed the night. Next morning, continuing their journey early, they breakfasted at Nairn. "Though a county town and a royal burgh, it is," writes Boswell, "a miserable place." Johnson also describes it as being "in a state of miserable decay." Nevertheless, "the chief annual magistrate," he says, "is styled Lord Provost." If it sank as a royal burgh, it has raised its head