Johnson was himself in Edinburgh. You remember how he arrived in February 1773 at Boyd’s Whitehorse Inn off St. Mary’s Wynd, not the more famous Inn of that name in the Whitehorse Close down the Canongate; how angry he was with the waiter for lifting with his dirty paw the sugar to put in his lemonade; how, in the malodorous High Street, he pleasantly remarked to Boswell, “I smell you in the dark”; how, as he listened at Holyrood to the story of the Rizzio murder, he muttered a line of the old ballad _Johnnie Armstrong’s last good-night_—“And ran him through the fair bodie.” They took him to the Royal Infirmary, and he noted the inscription “Clean your feet.” “Ah,” said he, “there is no occasion for putting this at the doors of your churches.” The gibe was justified; he had just looked in at St. Giles’, then used for every strange civic purpose, and plastered and twisted about to every strange shape. Most interesting to me is that Sunday morning, 15th August 1773, when Bozzy and Principal Robertson toiled with him up the College Wynd to see the University, and passed by Scott’s birthplace. The Wizard of the North was then two years old, and who could guess that his fame in after years would be greater than that of those three eminent men of letters put together? In this strange remote way do epochs touch one another. No wonder Bozzy’s relatives got tired of his last hobby, his very subject himself got tired. “Sir,” said the sage, “you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.” Yet Bozzy knew what he was about when he stuck to his one topic. After his idol was gone, what was there for him but the bottle? It was one of the earliest recollections of Lord Jeffrey that he had assisted as a boy in putting the biographer to bed in a state of absolute unconsciousness. Next morning Boswell was told of the service rendered: he clapped the lad on the head, and complacently congratulated him. “If you go on as you’ve begun, you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet.” And so much bemused the greatest of biographers vanishes from our sight. CHAPTER SEVEN MEN OF LETTERS. PART II.