4 ideas
Johnson argues that once the post-Culloden laws disarmed the Highlanders and abolished the chiefs' hereditary jurisdictions, the chief had no further use for military followers. He began to value his land for rent instead of men. The loyalty that had bound clansmen to chiefs lost its material basis and decayed into a plain landlord-tenant cash relationship, and rising rents pushed people toward emigration.
Johnson says he came too late to see the Highlands he expected, because the distinctive manners he wanted to observe were already fading under law and commerce. The traveler therefore has to read a way of life from its remnants, such as ruined castles, the memories of old men, and customs kept only in part. What looks like a traditional society is often a society in the middle of dissolving.
Johnson rejected the claimed antiquity of Macpherson's Ossian poems on two grounds. Gaelic had no early written literature, and a long poem cannot pass unchanged through generations of unlettered memory. He demanded that the manuscripts be produced. He held that without written records, oral tradition inevitably drifts, and that national pride leads people to vouch for what they have never seen.
In October 1773 the 64-year-old Johnson landed on Iona, the island where Columba's monastery had spread Christianity through Scotland. He found it poor and its religious buildings in ruins. He wrote that a man whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona is little to be envied. He used the moment to argue that places associated with great deeds properly stir feeling and moral reflection.