in his handwriting is preserved among the family papers at Cameron.[1]
On Thursday, October 28, a postchaise which Boswell had ordered from Glasgow, "came for us," he says, "and we drove on in high spirits." On their way they stopped at Dunbarton, then "a small but good old town, consisting principally of one large street in the form of a crescent;"[2] but now a smoky seat of the iron ship-building industry. The steep rock on which the Castle stands Johnson "ascended with alacrity." At Glasgow they stayed at the "Saracen's Head," "the paragon of inns in the eyes of the Scotch," says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, "but most wretchedly
DUNBARTON.
managed."[3] Our two travellers seem to have been contented. Johnson, no doubt, was kept in the best of humours by the sight of a great many letters from England, after the long interval of sixty-eight days during which not a line had reached him. "He enjoyed in imagination the comforts which we could now command, and seemed to be in high glee. I remember, he put a leg up on each side of the grate, and said, with a mock solemnity, by way of soliloquy, but loud enough for me to hear it: 'Here am I, an ENGLISH man, sitting by a coal fire.'" Of fires made by peat, that "sullen fuel," he had had enough in the last two months. All along the sea-board coal was made artificially dear by the folly of
