Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/183

Rh age, tales of the cruel duke used to he told in the winter evenings in the glens of these Western Highlands. They have at last died away, and "infant hatred" is no longer nourished.

Our travellers, whatever may have been their motive, leaving the Field of Culloden unvisited and unnoticed, arrived at Inverness, the capital of the Highlands. They put up at Mackenzie's Inn. Of their accommodation they say nothing; but it can scarcely have been good, if we may trust an English traveller who two years earlier had found, he said, the Horns Inn, kept by Mrs. Mackenzie, dirty and ill-managed. Perhaps they felt as Wolfe did when he was stationed in the town with his regiment. "It would be unmanly," he wrote, "and very unbecoming a soldier to complain of little evils, such as bad food, bad lodging, bad fire.... With these reflections I reconcile myself to Inverness, and to other melancholy spots that we are thrown upon." He adds that the post goes but once a week, and that as there are rapid rivers on the road that have neither bridge nor boat, it is often delayed by the floods. Wesley describes Inverness as the largest town he had seen in Scotland after Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. "It stands in a pleasant and fruitful country, and has all things needful for life and godliness. The people in general speak remarkably good English, and are of a friendly, courteous behaviour." Their good English they were said to derive from the garrison which Cromwell had settled among them. It had been noticed by Defoe. "They speak," he said, "perfect English, even much better than in the most southerly provinces of Scotland; nay, some will say that they speak it as well as at London, though I do not grant that neither." Their behaviour had greatly improved in the thirteen years which had elapsed between Wolfe's second and Wesley's first visit, unless the soldier had viewed them with the stern eye of the conqueror, or they had displayed the sullenness of the conquered. "A little while," he wrote, "serves to discover the villainous nature of the inhabitants and brutality of the people in the neighbourhood." Yet the brutality was quite as much on the side of the army, for a year later, five full years after the battle, we find the people still treated with harshness and insolence. The magistrates had invited Lord Bury, the general in Rh