Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/226

176 were told in our passage that it had eleven fine rooms, nor magnificently furnished, but our utensils were most commonly silver. We went up into a dining room about as large as your blue room, where we had something given us to eat, and tea and coffee." The blue room, less fortunate than its rival at Raasay, has been swept away, with all the beauty and the associations of Streatham Park. I was shown his chamber, with his portrait hanging on the wall. A walking-stick which he had used is treasured up. From his windows he looked down into the garden. However productive it may have been, it was not, I fear, so gay with flowers as it was when I saw it, or so rich in shrubs. I walked between fuchsia hedges that were much higher than my head. One fuchsia bush, or rather tree, which stood apart, covered with its branches a round of sixty feet. Its trunk was as thick as a man's thigh. The Western Islands are kept free from severe frosts by the waters of the Gulf Stream, so that in the spots which face the southern suns, and are sheltered from the north and east, there is a growth which rivals, and perhaps outdoes, that of Devonshire and Cornwall.

Not far from the house is the ruined chapel which provoked Johnson's sarcasm. "It has been," he writes, "for many years popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the Romish clergy; over the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches we may indulge our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with the fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall." Boswell took a more cheerful view. "There was something comfortable," he wrote, "in the thought of being so near a piece of consecrated ground." Here they looked upon the tombs of the Macleods of Raasay, that ancient family which boasted that "during four hundred years they had not gained or lost a single acre;" which was worthily represented in their host; which lasted for two generations longer, and then sank in ruins amidst the wild follies of a single laird. Whilst rack-renting landlords were driving their people across the wide Atlantic, Macleod of Raasay could boast "that his island had not yet been forsaken by a single inhabitant." Pleased with all he saw, "Johnson was in fine spirits. 'This,' he said, 'is truly the patriarchal life; this is what we came to find.'" He was delighted with the free and friendly life, the feasting and the dancing, and all