[Sidenote: POST-CHAISES AND ROADS.]
At Kinghorn, “a mean town,” which was said to consist chiefly of
“horse-hirers and boatmen noted all Scotland over for their impudence
and impositions,”[441] our travellers took a post-chaise for St.
Andrews. A few years earlier Johnson would not have found there his
favourite mode of conveyance. By the year 1758 post-chaises had only
penetrated as far north as Durham.[442] He found the roads good,
“neither rough nor dirty.” The absence of toll-gates, “afforded a
southern stranger a new kind of pleasure.” He would not have rejoiced
over this absence had he known that their want was supplied by the
forced labour of the cottars. On these poor men was laid “an annual
tax of six days’ labour for repairing the roads.”[443] Used as he was
to the rapid succession of carriages and riders, and to the beautiful
and varied scenery in the neighbourhood of London, he complained
that in Scotland there was “little diversion for the traveller, who
seldom sees himself either encountered or overtaken, and who has
nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible boundaries, or
are separated by walls of loose stone.” There were few of the heavy
waggons which were seen on the roads in England. A small cart drawn
by one little horse was the carriage in common use. “A man seemed
to derive some degree of dignity and importance from the reputation
of possessing a two-horse cart.” [Sidenote: KIRKALDY.] Three miles
beyond Kinghorn they drove through Kirkaldy, “a very long town, meanly
built,” where Adam Smith perhaps at that very time was taking his
one amusement, “a long, solitary walk by the sea-side,” smiling and
talking to himself and meditating his _Wealth of Nations_.[444] Here,
too, Thomas Carlyle was to have “will and waygate” upon all his friend
Irving’s books, and here “with greedy velocity” he was to read the
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ at the rate of a volume a day.
Along the beach he was to walk “in summer twilights, a mile of the
smoothest sand, with one long wave coming on gently, steadily, and
breaking in gradual explosion into harmless, melodious white at your
hand all the way.”[445] Of all the scenery which Johnson saw, either
here or on the rest of his drive, his description is of the briefest.
“The whole country,” he wrote, “is extended in uniform nakedness,
except that in the road between Kirkaldy and Cupar I passed for a
few yards between two hedges.” Night, however, had come on before
their journey was ended, for they had lost time at Inch Keith. They
could not, moreover, have been driven at a fast pace, for between
Kinghorn and St. Andrews, a distance of nearly thirty miles, there
was no change of horses to be had.[446] They crossed, perhaps without
knowing it, Magus Moor, where Archbishop Sharpe, “driving home from a
council day,” was killed “by a party of furious men.”[447] In going
over this same moor many years later, Sir Walter Scott, being moved,
as he says, by the spirit to give a picture of the assassination, so
told his tale that he “frightened away the night’s sleep of one of his
fellow-travellers.”[448]