Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/89

Rh years. The valley, which with its lawns, its slopes, its trim walls, its beds of (lowers, and its trees, adds so much to the pleasantness and beauty of Edinburgh, was when Johnson looked down into it "a deep morass, one of the dirtiest puddles upon earth." It was in its black mud that Hume one day stuck when he had slipped off the stepping-stones on the way to his new house. A fishwife, who was following after him, recognizing "the Deist," refused to help him unless he should recite first the Lord's Prayer and the Belief. This he at once did to her great wonder. His admiration for the New Town was unbounded. If the High Street was finer than anything of its kind in Europe the New Town, he maintained, exceeded anything in any part of the world. "You would not wonder that I have abjured London for ever," he wrote to his friend, Strahan, in the year 1772, "if you saw my new house and situation in St. Andrew's Square." Adam Smith told Rogers the poet, who visited Edinburgh in 1789, that the Old Town had given Scotland a bad name, and that he was anxious to move with the rest.

The age which I am attempting to describe was looked upon by Lord Cockburn as "the last purely Scotch age that Scotland was destined to see. The whole country had not begun to be absorbed in the ocean of London." The distance between the two capitals as measured by time, fatigue, and money was little less than the distance in the present day between Liverpool and New York. Johnson, who travelled in post-chaises, and therefore in great comfort, was nine days on the road. "He purposed," he wrote, "not to loiter much by the way;" but he did not journey by night, and he indulged in two days' rest at Newcastle. Hume, three years later, travelling by easy stages on account of his failing health, took two days longer. Had Johnson gone by the public conveyance, the "Newcastle Fly" would have brought him in three days as far as that town at a charge of £3 6s. On the panels of the "Fly" was painted the motto, Sat cito si sat bene. Thence he would have continued his journey by the "Edinburgh Fly," which