The wild and beautiful scenery of the Island of Skye does not seem to have made any impression on Johnson, and he leaves with no regret, merely admitting, that he has 'many pictures in his mind which he could not have had without his journey,' and that these pictures 'will serve later for pleasing topics of conversation.' What these pictures were he does not say, but they probably had little to do with what we now call the beauties of the Highlands; for he mentions that he found little entertainment in the wildernesses of the Hebrides, the universal barrenness oppressed him, and he points out that 'in those countries you are not to suppose that you shall find villages or enclosures. The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes but rarely with sight of cows, and now and then finds heaps of loose stones and turf in a cavity between the rocks, where a being, born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and the rain.' Also, that 'a walk upon ploughed fields in England is a dance upon carpets, compared to the toilsome drudgery of wandering in Skie.' But it is not surprising that Johnson at the age of sixty-four looked upon hilly country with aversion--the mountains interfered with his convenience. He only mentions the hills in Skye once. 'Here are mountains that I should once have climbed,' he writes to his friend Mrs. Thale; 'but to climb steeps is now very laborious, and to descend them dangerous.' No doubt at the Doctor's age he was right; still we feel somewhat disappointed that during his stay at Talisker, he was apparently unconscious of the Coolin, and we receive but small consolation from his elegant epistolary communications, when they tell us instead, that he was gratified sometimes but rarely with sight of cows, and that Mr. Boswell was affected almost to tears by the illustrious ruins at Iona. [Illustration: The Coolin.] All this shows us, how the attitude of people towards the wilds of the Highlands has become completely changed in one century, for Johnson was not in any way peculiar in his ideas. Look where we will in the literature of that time, we find the same sentiments. Pennant, who visited Skye the year before Dr. Johnson, describes the Coolin as 'a savage series of rude mountains,' whilst Blaven, 'affects him with astonishment.' Thirty years later the only natural objects in the island that interested Forsyth, at least so far as one can judge from what he writes in _The Beauties of Scotland_, were 'an obelisk of uncommon magnitude' in the parish of Snizort, (probably the Storr Rock,) and a waterfall and sea cave near Portree.