JOHNSON. "Why, who are before him [Goldsmith]?" BOSWELL. "Hume,—Robertson, or the foppery of Dalrymple." BOSWELL. "Will you not admit the superiority of Robertson, in whose History we find such penetration—such painting?" JOHNSON. "Sir, you must consider how that penetration and that painting are employed. It is not history, it is imagination. He who describes what he never saw, draws from fancy. Robertson paints minds as Sir Joshua paints faces in a history-piece: he imagines an heroick countenance. You must look upon Robertson's work as romance, and try it by that standard. History it is not. --Life of Johnson

And elsewhere: "I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: 'Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'"

... as to Robertson, he never was in America, he relates nothing on his own knolege, he is a compiler only of the relations of others, and a mere translator of the opinions of Mons. de Buffon... (TJ to Chastellux, 7 June 1785)

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=rbc3&fileName=rbc0001_2007jeffca...