Eight years after Gray's visit, Samuel Johnson in 1773 made his more adventurous journey to the Hebrides. When we consider what were the discomforts, and sometimes the actual dangers which he had to undergo, we cannot but admire the quiet courage with which he endured them, and the reticence with which he refers to them in his narrative. But Johnson could see no charm in the Highland mountains. In his poem on London he had asked many years before: 'For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's land, Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?' Yet when at last he set foot in Scotland, he showed no disposition to prefer its rocks to his haunts in London. Travelling through some of the finest scenery in Western Inverness-shire, this is the language he uses regarding it: 'The hills exhibit very little variety; being almost wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only by one sullen power of useless vegetation.'[50] While such was the attitude of the man of letters in this country, influences were at work on the Continent which powerfully affected the relations of literature to the whole realm of outer nature, and more especially to mountain-scenery. Rousseau's descriptions, followed by the more detailed and scientific narrative of De Saussure, drew the attention of society to the fascinations of Switzerland and the Alps. But these influences had hardly had time to exert much sway in their application to the scenery of our own country when the genius of Scott suddenly brought the features of the Scottish Highlands into the most popular literature of his day. In his youth the future poet and novelist had paid some visits to the glens and lakes of Perthshire, where he found many a primitive custom still remaining, which has since vanished before roads, railways, and tourists. In the year 1810 his _Lady of the Lake_ appeared. Thenceforward the stream of summer visitors set in, which has poured in an ever-increasing flood into the Highlands of Scotland. The general interest thus awakened in the glens and mountains of the north was still further intensified by the advent of the _Lord of the Isles_, and of _Waverley_, _Rob Roy_, and the other novels that depict scenes in the Highlands. Certainly no man ever did so much as Walter Scott to make the natural features of his native country familiar to the whole world. The literary charm which he threw over the hills and glens of Perthshire kindled a wide-spread enthusiasm for the more rugged aspects of nature, and gave a powerful