(_Page 352_).
On the passage in the text Macaulay in his Review of Croker's Edition of
_Boswell's Life of Johnson_ partly founds the following criticism:--
'Johnson's visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a state of society
completely new to him; and a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies
seems on that occasion to have crossed his mind for the first time. He
confessed, in the last paragraph of his _Journey_, that his thoughts on
national manners were the thoughts of one who had seen but little, of
one who had passed his time almost wholly in cities. This feeling,
however, soon passed away. It is remarkable that to the last he
entertained a fixed contempt for all those modes of life and those
studies which tend to emancipate the mind from the prejudices of a
particular age or a particular nation. Of foreign travel and of history
he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance. "What
does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling?
What did Lord Charlemont learn in his travels, except that there was a
snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?"' Macaulay's _Essays_, ed. 1843,
i. 403.