ining-room full of company; we feasted and talked, and when the evening
came it brought musick and dancing. Young Macleod, the great proprietor
of Skie, and head of his clan, was very distinguishable; a young man of
nineteen, bred awhile at St. Andrew's, and afterwards at Oxford, a pupil
of G. Strahan. He is a young man of a mind, as much advanced as I have
ever known; very elegant of manners, and very graceful in his person. He
has the full spirit of a feudal chief; and I was very ready to accept
his invitation to Dunvegan. All Raarsa's children are beautiful. The
ladies, all, except the eldest, are in the morning dressed in their
hair. The true highlander never wears more than a riband on her head,
till she is married.

On the third day Boswell went out, with old Malcolm, to see a ruined
castle, which he found less entire than was promised, but he saw the
country. I did not go, for the castle was, perhaps, ten miles off, and
there is no riding at Raarsa, the whole island being rock or mountain,
from which the cattle often fall, and are destroyed. It is very barren,
and maintains, as near as I could collect, about seven hundred
inhabitants, perhaps ten to a square mile. In these countries you are
not to suppose that you shall find villages or inclosures. The traveller
wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with
the sight of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and
turf, in a cavity between 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 rain.
Philosophers there are, who try to make themselves believe, that this
life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and
never yet produced conviction in a single mind; he whom want of words or
images sunk into silence still thought, as he thought before, that
privation of pleasure can never please, and that content is not to be
much envied, when it has no other principle than ignorance of good.

This gloomy tranquillity, which some may call fortitude, and others,
wisdom, was, I believe, for a long time, to be very frequently found in
these dens of poverty; every man was content to live like his
neighbours, and, never wandering from home, saw no mode of life
preferable to his own, except at the house of the laird, or the laird's
nearest relations, whom he considered as a superiour order of beings, to