"I received a note from Mr Johnson, that he was arrived at Boyd's Inn, at the head of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially; and I exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia. Mr Scott told me that, before I came in, the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no unfermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of the window. Scott said he was afraid he would have knocked the waiter down. Mr Johnson told me that such another trick was played him at the house of a lady in Paris.
He was to do me the honour to lodge under my roof. Mr Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm, up the High Street, to my house in James' Court; it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. I heard a late baronet of some distinction observe, that 'walking the streets of Edinburgh at night was pretty perilous, and a good deal odoriferous'. The peril is much abated, by the care which the magistrates have taken to enforce the city laws against throwing foul water from the windows; but, from the structure of the houses in the old town, which consist of many storeys, in each of which a different family lives, and there being no covered sewers, the odour still continues. a zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr Johnson to be without one of his five senses upon this occasion."
James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,
14 August, 1773
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