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The French writer, Faujas de Saint Fond, who visited the Highlands about the year 1780, was touched with the same un romantic gloom. When on his way from the barren mountains of the north he reached the fertile southern shore of Loch Tay, and caught the first glimpse of the change to happier climes, his soul experienced as sweet a joy as is given by the first breath of spring. He had escaped from a land where winter seemed eternally to reign, where all was wild, and barren, and sad. Even Macleod of Macleod, the proprietor of nine inhabited isles and of islands uninhabited almost beyond number, who held four times as much land as the Duke of Bedford, even that "mighty monarch," as Johnson called him, looked upon life in his castle at Dunvegan as "confinement in a remote corner of the world," and upon the Western Islands as "dreary regions." Slight, then, must have been the shock which Johnson gave even to the poets among his fellows, when on "a delightful day" in April, he set Fleet Street with its "cheerful scene" above Tempé, and far above Mull. To the men of his time rocks would have "towered in horrid nakedness," and "wandering in Skye" would have seemed "a toilsome drudgery." Nature there would have looked "naked," and these poverty-stricken regions "malignant." Few would have been "the allurements of these islands," for "desolation and penury" would have given as "little pleasure" to them as it did to him." In GlencroeGlencoe [sic] they would have found "a black and dreary region," and in Mull "a gloomy desolation." Everywhere "they would have been repelled by the wide extent of hopeless sterility," and everywhere fatigued by the