Otaheite especially had won his admiration. "No, Sir;" said Johnson to him on one such occasion: "You are not to talk such paradox; let me have no more on't. It cannot entertain, far less can it instruct." "Don't cant in defence of savages," he said, on another occasion. At Cameron they had none of this fanciful talk. Their host "was a man of considerable learning, with abundance of animal spirits; so that he was a very good companion for Dr. Johnson, who said, 'We have had more solid talk here than at any place where we have been.'" He was a relation of the great novelist, and one of the four judges of the Commissary Court in Edinburgh. 
SMOLLET'S PILLAR. It was the sole court in Scotland which took cognisance of actions about marriage, and the Supreme Court in all questions of probate. "It sat," says the lively Topham, "in a little room of about ten feet square; from the darkness and dirtiness of it you would rather imagine that those who were brought into it were confined there." The judges were paid rather by perquisites than by salaries. In each cause they fixed the amount which the litigants should pay them for the sentence which they pronounced.[1]
Smollett, in his Humphry Clinker, brings Matthew Bramble and his nephew to Cameron, who describe it as "a very neat country house, but so embosomed in an oak wood that we did not see it till we were within fifty yards of the door." "If I was disposed to be critical," Mr. Bramble continues, "I should say it is too near the Lake, which approaches on one side to within six or seven yards of the window."[2] The Commissary had erected a pillar by the side of the high road to Glasgow, "to the memory of his ingenious kinsman," who two years earlier had died in Italy, "Eheu! quam procul a patria!" The Latin inscription for this monument was shown to Johnson, and revised by him "with an ardent and liberal earnestness." The copy with the corrections
