TOUR TO THE HEBRIDE

’Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides.’ WORDSWORTH.

When Boswell was leaving London in May he called, for the last time, upon Goldsmith, round whom the clouds of misfortune were fast settling, and who was planning a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences as a means of extrication from his embarrassments. In such circumstances, it was not unnatural for Goldsmith to revert to his own past travels, and to the reflection that he was unlikely again to set out upon them, unless sheltered like Johnson behind a pension. He assured Boswell that he would never be able to lug the dead weight of the Rambler through the Highlands. The enthusiastic pioneer, however, was loud in the praises of his companion; Goldsmith thought him not equal to Burke, ’who winds into a subject like a serpent.’ The other, with more than wonted irrelevance, maintained that Johnson was ’the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle;’ and with these characteristic utterances they parted, never again to meet. Throughout his great work, Boswell shews ever a curious depreciation of Goldsmith. Rivalry for the good graces of their common friend Johnson, as Scott thought, and the fear of his older acquaintance as the possible biographer made him suspicious of the merits of the poet, who figures in the pages of Boswell as a foil for his gently patronizing tone, ’honest Goldsmith.’

The tour to the Hebrides had been a project which had occurred to them in the first days of their friendship. The Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (1703) by Martin, had been put into Johnson’s hands at a very early age by his father; and, though for long he had disappointed the expectations of his friend, he had talked of it in the spring of this year in such a way as to lead Boswell to write to Beattie, Robertson, Lord Elibank, and the chiefs of the Macdonalds and the Macleods, for invitations such as he could shew the doctor. Mrs Thrale also and others were induced to forward the scheme, and at last the Rambler set out on the 6th day of August. He was nine days upon the road, including two at Newcastle, where he picked up his friend Scott (Lord Stowell), and after passing Berwick, Dunbar and Prestonpans, the coach late in the evening deposited Johnson at Boyd’s inn, The White Horse, in the Canongate, the rendezvous of the old Hanoverian faction, which occupied the site of the present building from which this volume, one hundred and twenty-three years later, is published. On the Saturday evening of his arrival a note was dispatched by him to Boswell, who flew to him, and ’exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia.’

Arm in arm they walked up the High Street to Boswell’s house in James’s Court, to which he had removed from the Canongate. The first impression of the Scottish capital was not pleasing, for at ten the beat of the city drums was heard; and, amid cries of gardy loo, what Oldham euphemistically calls ‘the perils of the night,’ were thrown over the windows down on the pavement, in the absence of covered sewers. When Captain Burt before this time had been in Edinburgh, a ‘caddie’ had preceded him on a scouting expedition with cries of ‘haud your han’,’ and among flank and rear discharges he had passed to his quarters. A zealous Scotsman, as Boswell says, could have wished the doctor to be less gifted with the sense of smell, however much the sense of the breadth of the street and the height of the buildings impressed him. His wife had tea waiting, and they sat till two in the morning. To shew respect for the sage, Mrs Boswell had given up her own room, which her husband ’cannot but gratefully mention, as one of a thousand obligations which I owe her, since the great obligation of her being pleased to accept of me as her husband.’

Next morning, on the Sunday, Mr Scott and Sir Wm. Forbes of Pitsligo breakfasted with them, and the host’s heart was delighted by the ’little infantine noise’ which his child Veronica made, with the appearance of listening to the great man. The fond father with a cheerful recklessness, not realized we fear, declared she should have for this five hundred pounds of additional fortune.

The best society in the capital was invited to meet Johnson at breakfast and dinner Robertson, Hailes, Gregory, Blacklock, and others. James’s Court was rather a distinguished part of the city, and an improvement upon the former quarters in Chessel’s Buildings. The inhabitants, says Robert Chambers, took themselves so seriously as to keep a clerk to record their proceedings, together with a scavenger of their own, and held among themselves their social meetings and balls. Hume had occupied part of the house before Johnson’s visit, though three years had passed since he had moved to the new town into St David Street. Writing from his old house to Adam Smith, he is glad to ’have come within sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkcaldy from my windows;’ the study of the historian, to which he turned fondly from the Parisian salons, is represented in Guy Mannering as the library of Pleydell with its fine view from the windows, ’which commanded that incomparable prospect of the ground between Edinburgh and the sea, the Firth of Forth with its islands, and the varied shore of Fife to the northward.’ Bozzy may have been reticent about the former tenant; he was ’not clear that it was right in me to keep company with him,’ though he thought the man greater or better than his books. No word then was sent to him, nor to Adam Smith across the Forth to Kirkcaldy. They visited the Parliament House, where Harry Erskine was presented to Johnson, and, having made his bow, slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hand, ‘for the sight of his bear.’ Holyrood and the University were inspected, and as they passed up the College-Wynd, where Goldsmith in his medical student days in Edinburgh had lived, Scott, as a child of two years, may have seen the party. On the 18th they set out from the capital, with the Parthian shot from Lord Auchinleck to a friend ’there’s nae hope for Jamie, man; Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, man? He’s done wi’ Paoli. He’s off wi’ the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican, and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, man? A dominie, an auld dominie; he keepit a schule and ca’ad it an acaadamy!’ No more bitter taunt could have been levelled against Johnson, with his memories of Edial, near Lichfield; readers who may remember the munificent manner in which the heritors of their day had provided for Ruddiman, Michael Bruce, and others, will see the contempt that the old judge had felt for the past of the Rambler. Johnson had left behind him in a drawer a volume of his diary; and, as this would have been excellent copy for his projected Life, we feel the temptation to which Boswell was exposed. ‘I wish,’ he says naively, ’that female curiosity had been strong enough to have had it all transcribed; which might easily have been done; and I think the theft, being pro bono publico, might have been forgiven. But I may be wrong. My wife told me she never once had looked into it. She did not seem quite easy when we left her; but away we went!’

The character-sketch of Johnson, given at the opening of the book is full of fine shading and touches; but the traveller who now follows them on the journey will hardly, in comparison with his own tourist attire, recognise what in 1773 was thought fit and convenient costume.

’He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon this tour, when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth greatcoat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio Dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles.’

A companion vignette of himself is added by Boswell.

’A gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant passion. He was then in his thirty-third year, and had been about four years happily married. His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father had pressed him into the profession of the law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties of human life. He had thought more than anyone had supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. He had rather too little, than too much prudence; and, his imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect was very different from the intention. He resembled sometimes

‘The best good man, with the worst natur’d muse.’

The doctor who was thrifty over this tour had not thought it necessary to bring his own black servant; but Boswell’s man, Joseph Ritter, a Bohemian, a fine stately fellow over six feet, who had been over much of Europe, was invaluable to them in their journey. For this the valiant Rambler had provided a pair of pistols, powder, and a quantity of bullets, but the assurance of their needlessness had induced him to leave them behind with the precious diary in the keeping of Mrs Boswell.

Such a tour was then a feat for a man of sixty-four, in a country which, to the Englishman of his day, was as unknown as St Kilda is now to the mass of Scotchmen. The London citizen who, says Lockhart, ’makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben Nevis,’ can with difficulty imagine a journey in the Hebrides with rainy weather, in open boats, or upon horseback over wild moorland and morasses, a journey that even to Voltaire sounded like a tour to the North Pole. Smollett, in Humphrey Clinker, says the people at the other end of the island knew as little of Scotland as they did of Japan, nor was Charing Cross, witness as it did the greatest height of ‘the tide of human existence,’ then bright with the autumnal trips of circular tours and Macbrayne steamers. The feeling for scenery, besides, was in its infancy, nor was it scenery but men and manners that were sought by our two travellers, to whom what would now be styled the Wordsworthian feeling had little or no interest. Gibbon has none of it, and Johnston laughed at Shenstone for not caring whether his woods and streams had anything good to eat in them, ’as if one could fill one’s belly with hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades.’ Fleet Street to him was more delicious than Tempe, and the bare scent of the pastoral draws an angry snort from the critic. Boswell, in turn, confesses to no relish for nature; he admits he has no pencil for visible objects, but only for varieties of mind and esprit. The Critical Review congratulated the public on a fortunate event in the annals of literature for the following account in Johnson’s Journey ’I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had, indeed, no trees to whisper over my head but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high hills, which, if hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself.’ This, little more than the reflections of a Cockney on a hayrick, is as far as the eighteenth century could go, nor need we wonder that the Rambler’s moralizing at Iona struck so much Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, that he ’clasped his hands together, and remained for some time in an attitude of silent admiration.’ Burns himself, as Prof. Veitch has rightly indicated, has little of the later feeling and regards barren nature with the unfavourable eyes of the farmer and the practical agriculturist, nor has the travelled Goldsmith more to shew. Writing from Edinburgh, he laments that ’no grove or brook lend their music to cheer the stranger,’ while at Leyden, ’wherever I turned my eye, fine houses, elegant gardens, statues, grottoes, presented themselves.’ Even Gray found that Mount Cenis carried the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far, and Wordsworth and Shelley would have resented the Johnsonian description of a Highland Ben as ’a considerable protuberance.’ Indeed, Goldsmith’s bare mention of that object, so dear to Pope and his century, ’grottoes’ reminds us we are not yet in the modern world. Yet the boldness of the sage, and the cheerfulness of Boswell, carried them through it all. ‘I should,’ wrote the doctor to Mrs Thrale, ’have been very sorry to have missed any of the inconveniences, to have had more light or less rain, for their co-operation crowded the scene and filled the mind.’

Crossing the Firth, after landing on Inchkeith, they arrived at St Andrews which had long been an object of interest to Johnson. They passed Leuchars, Dundee, and Aberbrothick. The ruins of ecclesiastical magnificence would seem to have touched a hidden chord in Boswell’s past, for we find him on the road talking of the ’Roman Catholick faith,’ and leading his companion on transubstantiation; but this, being ‘an awful subject, I did not then press Dr Johnson upon it.’ Montrose was reached, and at the inn the waiter was called ‘rascal’ by the Rambler for putting sugar into the lemonade with his fingers, to the delight of Bozzy who rallied him into quietness by the assurance that the landlord was an Englishman. Monboddo was then passed, where ’the magnetism of his conversation drew us out of our way,’ though the prompt action of Boswell as agent in advance really was the source of their invitation. Burnet was one of the best scholars in Scotland, and ‘Johnson and my lord spoke highly of Homer.’ All his paradoxes about the superiority of the ancients, the existence of men with tails, slavery and other institutions were vented, but all went well. The decrease of learning in England, which Johnson lamented, was met by Monboddo’s belief in its extinction in Scotland, but Bozzy, as the old High School of Edinburgh boy, put in a word for that place of education and brought him to confess that it did well.

The New Inn at Aberdeen was full. But the waiter knew Boswell by his likeness to his father who put up here on circuit the only portrait, we believe, there is of Lord Auchinleck and accommodation was provided. They visited King’s College, where Boswell ’stepped into the chapel and looked at the tomb of its founder, Bishop Elphinstone, of whom I shall have occasion to write in my history of James IV., the patron of my family.’ The freedom of the city was conferred on Johnson. Was this an honour, or an excuse for a social glass among the civic Solons of an unreformed corporation? The latter may be the case, when we reflect that none of the four universities thought of giving him an honorary degree, though Beattie at this time had received the doctorate in laws from Oxford, and Gray some years before this had declined the offer from Aberdeen. Nor can we forget the taunt of George Colman the younger about Pangloss in his Heir at Law, and his own recollection how, when a lad at King’s College, he had been ’scarcely a week in Old Aberdeen when the Lord Provost of the New Town invited me to drink wine with him, one evening in the Town Hall;’ and presented him on October 8th, 1781, with the freedom of the city. No negative inference can be established from the contemporary notices in the Aberdeen Journal over the visit. Every paragraph is contemptuous in its tone; and till October 4th no notice is taken of the honour, when ’a correspondent says he is glad to find that the city of Aberdeen has presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed for a pension.’ The definition of oats in the Dictionary is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour and his system of spelling. But the doctor easily maintained his conversational supremacy over his academic hosts, who ‘started not a single mawkin for us to pursue.’

Ellon, Slains Castle, and Elgin were visited. They passed Gordon Castle at Fochabers, drove over the heath where Macbeth met the witches, ‘classic ground to an Englishman,’ as the old editor of Shakespeare felt, and reached Nairn, where now they heard for the first time the Gaelic tongue, ’one of the songs of Ossian,’ quoth the justly incredulous doctor, and saw peat fires. At Fort George they were welcomed by Sir Eyre Coote. The old military aspirations of Bozzy flared up and were soothed: ’for a little while I fancied myself a military man, and it pleased me.’ As they left, the commander reminded them of the hardships by the way, in return as Boswell interposed for the rough things Johnson had said of Scotland. ‘You must change your name, sir,’ said Sir Eyre. ‘Ay, to Dr M’Gregor,’ replied Bozzy. The notion of the lexicographer’s assuming the forbidden name of the bold outlaw, with ‘his foot upon his native heath,’ is rather comic, though later on we find him striding about with a target and broad sword, and a bonnet drawn over his wig! Though both professed profuse addiction to Jacobite sentiments, it is curious no mention is made of Culloden. It may be that Boswell, who some days later weeps over the battle, may have diplomatically avoided it, or it may have been dark as their chaise passed it, though it is not impossible that Boswell, who at St Andrews had not known where to look for John Knox’s grave, and has no mention of Airsmoss where Cameron fell in his own parish of Auchinleck, was ignorant of the site. From their inn at Inverness he wrote to Garrick gleefully over his tour with Davy’s old preceptor, and then begged permission to leave Johnson for a time, ’that I might run about and pay some visits to several good people,’ finding much satisfaction in hearing every one speak well of his father.

On Monday, August 30, they began their equitation; ’I would needs make a word too.’ They took horses now, a third carried his man Ritter, and a fourth their portmanteaus. The scene by Loch Ness was new to the sage, and he rises in his narrative a little to it and the ’limpid waters beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation.’ Through Glenshiel, Glenmorison, Auchnasheal, they passed on to the inn at Glenelg. They made beds for themselves with fresh hay, and, like Wolfe at Quebec, they had their ‘choice of difficulties;’ but the philosophic Rambler maintained they might have been worse on the hillside, and buttoning himself up in his greatcoat he lay down, while Boswell had his sheets spread on the hay, and his clothes and greatcoat laid over him by way of blankets.

Next day they got into a boat for Skye, reaching Armidale before one. Here occurred one of the dramatic episodes of the book. Sir Alexander Macdonald, husband of Boswell’s Yorkshire cousin Miss Bosville, and the host at the masquerade in February, was on his way to Edinburgh, and met them at the house of a tenant, ‘as we believe,’ wrote Johnson to Mrs Thrale, ’that he might with less reproach entertain us meanly. Boswell was very angry, and reproached him with his improper parsimony. Boswell has some thoughts of collecting the stories and making a novel of his life.’ In the first edition of his book something strong had clearly been written, but it was wisely suppressed at the last moment when the book was bound, for the new pages are but clumsily pasted on the guard between leaves 166 and 169. The first edition had accordingly this account, which was even toned down in the next.

’Instead of finding the head of the Macdonalds surrounded with his clan, and a festive entertainment, we had a small company and cannot boast of our cheer. The particulars are minuted in my journal, but I shall not trouble the publick with them. I shall mention but one characteristick circumstance. My shrewd and hearty friend, Sir Thomas Blackett, Lady Macdonald’s uncle, who had preceded us in a visit to this chief, upon being asked by him if the punchbowl then upon the table was not a very handsome one, replied, “Yes, if it were full.” Sir Alexander, having been an Eton scholar, Dr Johnson had formed an opinion of him which was much diminished when he beheld him in the Isle of Sky, where we heard heavy complaints of rents racked, and the people driven to emigration. Dr Johnson said, “it grieves me to see the chief of a great clan appear to such disadvantage. The gentleman has talents, nay, some learning; but he is totally unfit for his situation. Sir, the Highland chiefs should not be allowed to go further south than Aberdeen.” I meditated an escape from this the very next day, but Dr Johnson resolved that we should weather it out till Monday.’

Next day being Sunday Bozzy’s spirits were cheered by the climate and the weather, but ’had I not had Dr Johnson to contemplate, I should have been sunk into dejection, but his firmness supported me. I looked at him as a man whose head is turning giddy at sea looks at a rock.’ Everywhere they met signs of the parting of the ways in the Highlands. The old days of feudal power were merging in the industrial, the chiefs were now landlords and exacting ones. Emigration was rife, and the pages of the Scots Magazine of the time dwell much on this. A month before, four hundred men had left Strathglass and Glengarry; in June eight hundred had sailed from Stornoway; Lochaber sent four hundred, ’the finest set of fellows in the Highlands, carrying L6000 in ready cash with them. The extravagant rents exacted by the landlords is the sole cause given for this emigration which seems to be only in its infancy.’ The high price of provisions and the decrease of the linen trade in the north of Ireland sent eight hundred this year from Stromness, when we find the linen dealers thanking Boswell’s old rival, as he supposed, with Miss Blair, Sir Alexander Gilmour, M.P. for Midlothian, for his efforts at providing better legislation.

Rasay is one of the happiest descriptions in the tour. ‘This,’ said Johnson, ‘is truly the patriarchal life; this is what we came to find.’ They heard from home and had letters. At Kingsburgh they were welcomed by the lady of the house, ’the celebrated Miss Flora Macdonald, a little woman of genteel appearance; and uncommonly mild and well-bred.’ ’I was in a cordial humour, and promoted a cheerful glass. Honest Mr M’Queen observed that I was in high glee, “my governor being gone to bed.” ... The room where we lay was a celebrated one. Dr Johnson’s bed was the very bed in which the grandson of the unfortunate King James the Second lay, on one of the nights after the failure of his rash attempt in 1745-6. To see Dr Samuel Johnson lying in that bed, in the Isle of Sky, in the house of Miss Flora Macdonald, struck me with such a group of ideas as it is not easy for words to describe, as they passed through the mind. The room was decorated with a great variety of maps and prints. Among others, was Hogarth’s print of Wilkes grinning, with a cap of liberty on a pole by him.’ Certainly Bozzy had never thought of finding a remembrance of his ‘classic friend’ in such circumstances.

Dunvegan and the castle of the Macleods received them in hospitable style. ‘Boswell,’ said Johnson, in allusion to Sir Alexander’s stinted ways, ‘we came in at the wrong end of the island;’ the memories of their visit had not been forgotten when Scott was there on his Lighthouse Tour in 1814. The Rambler ’had tasted lotus, and was in danger of forgetting he was ever to depart.’

Landing at Strolimus, they proceeded to Corrichatachin, ’with but a single star to light us on our way.’ There took place the scene that, though familiar, must be given in the writer’s own words. A man who, for artistic setting and colour, could write it deliberately down even to his own disadvantage, and who could appeal to serious critics and readers of discernment and taste against the objections which he saw himself would be raised from the misinterpretation of others, is a figure not to be met with every day in literature.

’Dr Johnson went to bed soon. When one bowl of punch was finished, I rose, and was near the door, on my way upstairs to bed; but Corrichatachin said, it was the first time Col had been in his house, and he should have his bowl; and would not I join in drinking it? The heartiness of my honest landlord, and the desire of doing social honour to our very obliging conductor, induced me to sit down again. Col’s bowl was finished; and by that time we were well warmed. A third bowl was soon made, and that too was finished. We were cordial, and merry to a high degree; but of what passed I have no recollection, with any accuracy. I remember calling Corrichatachin by the familiar appellation of Corri which his friends do. A fourth bowl was made, by which time Col, and young M’Kinnon, Corrichatachin’s son, slipped away to bed. I continued a little time with Corri and Knockow; but at last I left them. It was near five in the morning when I got to bed. Sunday, September 26. I awaked at noon with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr Johnson, I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the Rambler. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, “What, drunk yet?” His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. “Sir,” (said I), “they kept me up.” He answered, “No, you kept them up, you drunken dog:” this he said with good-humoured English pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. “Ay,” said Dr Johnson, “fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and skulk to bed, and let his friends have no sport.” Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy; and when I offered to get up, he very good naturedly said, “You need be in no such hurry now.” I took my host’s advice, and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my head-ach. When I rose, I went into Dr Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs M’Kinnon’s Prayer-Book, I opened it at the twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, “And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.” Some would have taken this as a divine interposition.’

Such is the extraordinary confession. St Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, have not quite equalled this. He found it had been made the subject of serious criticism and ludicrous banter. But his one object, as he tells ‘serious criticks,’ has been to delineate Johnson’s character, and for this purpose he appeals from Philip drunk to Philip sober, and to the approbation of the discerning reader. Later on, he has laid the flattering unction to his heart, and has extracted comfort from the soul of things evil. He felt comfortable, and ’I then thought that my last night’s riot was no more than such a social excess as may happen without much moral blame; and recollected that some physicians maintained, that a fever produced by it was, upon the whole, good for health: so different are our reflections on the same subject, at different periods; and such the excuses with which we palliate what we know to be wrong.’

Leaving Skye, they ran before the wind to Col.

’It was very dark, and there was a heavy and incessant rain. The sparks of the burning peat flew so much about, that I dreaded the vessel might take fire. Then as Col was a sportsman, and had powder on board, I figured that we might be blown up. Our vessel often lay so much on one side, that I trembled lest she should be overset, and indeed they told me afterwards that they had run her sometimes to within an inch of the water, so anxious were they to make what haste they could before the night should be worse. I now saw what I never saw before, a prodigious sea, with immense billows coming upon a vessel, so that it seemed hardly possible to escape. I am glad I have seen it once. I endeavoured to compose my mind; when I thought of those who were dearest to me, and would suffer severely, should I be lost, I upbraided myself. Piety afforded me comfort; yet I was disturbed by the objections that have been made against a particular providence, and by the arguments of those who maintain that it is in vain to hope that the petitions of an individual, or even of congregations, can have any influence with the Deity. I asked Col with much earnestness what I could do. He with a happy readiness put into my hand a rope, which was fixed to the top of one of the masts, and told me to hold it till he bade me pull. If I had considered the matter, I might have seen that this could not be of the slightest service; but his object was to keep me out of the way.... Thus did I stand firm to my post, while the wind and rain beat upon me, always expecting a call to pull my rope.... They spied the harbour of Lochiern, and Col cried, “Thank God, we are safe!” Dr Johnson had all this time been quiet and unconcerned. He had lain down on one of the beds, and having got free from sickness, was satisfied. The truth is, he knew nothing of the danger we were in. Once he asked whither we were going; upon being told that it was not certain whether to Mull or Col, he cried, “Col for my money!” I now went down to visit him. He was lying in philosophick tranquillity, with a greyhound of Col’s at his back keeping him warm.’

Mull, Tobermory, Ulva’s Isle, and Inch Kenneth followed. Then Iona, ’the sacred place which as long as I can remember, I had thought on with veneration.’ The two friends, as they landed on the island, ‘cordially embraced,’ as they had done in the White Horse at Edinburgh, and the mark of feeling is a note that we are yet with them in the eighteenth century. They lay in a barn with a portmanteau for a pillow, and ’when I awaked in the morning and looked round me, I could not help smiling at the idea of the chief of the Macleans, the great English moralist, and myself lying thus extended in such a situation.’ The old Boswell of the Roman Catholic days appears at this time. ‘Boswell,’ writes Johnson to Mrs Thrale, ’who is very pious went into the chapel at night to perform his devotions, but came back in haste for fear of spectres.’ Second sight was often in their thoughts and conversation on their tour; at the club Colman had jocularly to bid Boswell ‘cork it up’ when he was too full of his belief on the point. His fear of ghosts reminds one of Pepys in the year of the great plague, as he went through the graveyard of the church, with the bodies buried thick and high, ‘frighted and much troubled.’

‘I left him,’ says Boswell himself, ’and Sir Allan at breakfast in our barn, and stole back again to the cathedral, to indulge in solitude and devout meditation. When contemplating the venerable ruins, I reflected with much satisfaction, that the solemn scenes of piety never lose their sanctity and influence, though the cares and follies of life may prevent us from visiting them.... I hoped that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should maintain an exemplary conduct. One has a strange propensity to fix upon some point of time from whence a better course of life may begin.’ This is a revelation of the inner Boswell. On the eve of the appearance of the Tour in Corsica, he had written to Temple, about ’fixing some period for my perfection as far as possible. Let it be when my account of Corsica is finished. I shall then have a character to support.’ On landing at Rasay, he noticed the remains of a cross on the rock, ‘which had to me a pleasing vestige of religion,’ and he ’could not but value the family seat more for having even the ruins of a chapel close to it. There was something comforting in the thought of being so near a piece of consecrated ground.’

Oban received them with a tolerable inn. They were again on the mainland, and found papers with conjectures as to their motions in the islands. Next day they spent at Inverary. The castle of the Duke of Argyll was near, and now, for the first time on the tour, the indefatigable agent in advance was completely nonplussed. The spectre of the great Douglas Trial loomed large in the eyes of the pamphleteer and the hero of the riot. He had reason, he says, to fear hostile reprisals on the part of the Duchess, who had been Duchess of Hamilton and mother of the rival claimant, before she had become the wife of John, fifth Duke of Argyll. It is from this scene and from the Stratford Jubilee fiasco that the general reader draws his picture of poor Bozzy, and the belief remains that James Boswell was a pushing and forward interloper, half mountebank and half showman. Read in the original, as a revelation of the writer’s character, the very reverse is the impression; he is there presented not in any ludicrous light but rather in a good-humoured and fussy way. He met his friend the Rev. John Macaulay, one of the ministers of Inverary, who accompanied them to the castle, where Boswell presented the doctor to the Duke. ‘I shall never forget,’ quaintly adds the chronicler, ’the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies’ maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and gay inviting appearance, pleased me so much, that I thought, for a moment, I could have been a knight-errant for them.’ This grandfather of the historian and essayist, the man who has dealt the heaviest blow to the reputation of poor Bozzy, was to encounter some warm retorts from the Rambler like his brother, Macaulay’s grand-uncle, the minister at Calder. Mr Trevelyan is eager for the good name of his family, and finds it impossible to suppress a wish that the great talker had been there to avenge them. It may not be quite impossible that, mingling with the brilliant essayist’s ill-will to the politics of the travellers, there was an unconscious strain of resentment at the contemptuous way in which his relations had been tossed by the doctor, and that Bozzy’s own subsequent denunciations of the abolitionists and the slave trade had edged the memories in the mind of the son of Zachary Macaulay. Be this as it may, for this scene Macaulay has a keen eye, and as much of his colour is derived from it, it is but right that in some abridged form the incident be set down here in Boswell’s own words

’I went to the castle just about the time when I supposed the ladies would be retired from dinner. I sent in my name; and, being shewn in, found the amiable Duke sitting at the head of his table with several gentlemen. I was most politely received, and gave his grace some particulars of the curious journey which I had been making with Dr Johnson.... As I was going away, the Duke said, “Mr Boswell, won’t you have some tea?” I thought it best to get over the meeting with the Duchess this night; so respectfully agreed. I was conducted to the drawing-room by the Duke, who announced my name; but the duchess, who was sitting with her daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, and some other ladies, took not the least notice of me. I should have been mortified at being thus coldly received, had I not been consoled by the obliging attention of the Duke.

’Monday, October 25. I presented Dr Johnson to the Duke of Argyll ... the duke placed Dr Johnson next himself at table. I was in fine spirits; and though sensible of not being in favour with the duchess, I was not in the least disconcerted, and offered her grace some of the dish that was before me. It must be owned that I was in the right to be quite unconcerned, if I could. I was the Duke of Argyll’s guest; and I had no reason to suppose that he adopted the prejudices and resentments of the Duchess of Hamilton.

’I knew it was the rule of modern high life not to drink to anybody; but, that I might have the satisfaction for once to look the duchess in the face, with a glass in my hand, I with a respectful air addressed her, “My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink your grace’s good health.” I repeated the words audibly, and with a steady countenance. This was, perhaps, rather too much; but some allowance must be made for human feelings. I made some remark that seemed to imply a belief in second sight. The duchess said, “I fancy you will be a methodist.” This was the only sentence her grace deigned to utter to me; and I take it for granted, she thought it a good hit on my credulity in the Douglas Cause.

’We went to tea. The duke and I walked up and down the drawing-room, conversing. The duchess still continued to shew the same marked coldness for me; for which, though I suffered from it, I made every allowance, considering the very warm part that I had taken for Douglas, in the cause in which she thought her son deeply interested. Had not her grace discovered some displeasure towards me, I should have suspected her of insensibility or dissimulation. Her grace made Dr Johnson come and sit by her, and asked him why he made his journey so late in the year. “Why, madam (said he), you know Mr Boswell must attend the Court of Session, and it does not rise till the 12th of August.” She said, with some sharpness, “I know nothing of Mr Boswell.” Poor Lady Lucy Douglas, to whom I mentioned this, observed, “She knew too much of Mr Boswell.” I shall make no remark on her grace’s speech, etc., etc.’

In all this scene it will be confessed there is nothing but rudeness on the part of the duchess, one of the beautiful Gunnings, intentional or otherwise, while the kindly touches on Boswell’s part, his allowance for her supposed feelings over the trial, and his determination, for once, to look a duchess in the face, are admirable. Bozzy was by birth a gentleman, and there is not the slightest indication here of any want of breeding or taste on his side.

At Dumbarton, steep as is the incline, Johnson ascended it. The Saracen’s Head, which had welcomed Paoli before now, received the travellers. There was now no more sullen fuel or peat. ‘Here am I,’ soliloquized the Rambler, with a leg upon each side of the grate, ’an Englishman, sitting by a coal fire.’

‘Jamie’s aff the hooks noo;’ said the old laird, as they drew near Auchinleck, ‘he’s bringing doon an auld dominie.’ Boswell begged of his companion to avoid three topics of discourse on which he knew his father had fixed opinions Whiggism, Presbyterianism, and Sir John Pringle. For a time all went well. They walked about ’the romantick groves of my ancestors,’ and Bozzy discoursed on the antiquity and honourable alliances of the family, and on the merits of its founder, Thomas, who fell with King James at Flodden. But the storm broke, over the judge’s collection of medals, where that of Oliver Cromwell brought up Charles the First and Episcopacy. All must regret that the writer’s filial feelings withheld the ‘interesting scene in this dramatick sketch.’ It is the one lacuna in the book. Sir John Pringle, as the middle term in the debate, came off without a bruise, but the honours lay with Lord Auchinleck. The man whose ‘Scots strength of sarcasm’ could retort on Johnson, that Cromwell was a man that let kings know they ’had a lith in their neck,’ was likely to open new ideas to the doctor, whose political opinions could not rank higher than prejudices. ’Thus they parted,’ says the son, after his father had, with his dignified courtesy, seen Johnson into the postchaise; ’they are now in a happier state of existence, in a place where there is no room for Whiggism.’ ‘I have always said,’ the doctor maintained, ’the first Whig was the Devil!’

Edinburgh was reached on November 9th. Eighty-three days had passed since they left it, and for five weeks no news of them had been heard. Writing from London, on his arrival, Johnson said, ’I came home last night, without any incommodity, danger, or weariness, and am ready to begin a new journey. I know Mrs Boswell wished me well to go.’ The irregular hours of her guest, and his habit of turning the candles downward when they did not burn brightly, letting the wax run upon the carpet, had not been quite to the taste of the hostess, who resented, ‘what was very natural to a female mind,’ the influence he possessed over the actions of her husband.

We may well call this tour a spirited one, as Boswell had styled his own Corsican expedition. No better book of travels in Scotland has ever been written than Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The accuracy of his description, his eye for scenes and dramatic effects, have all been fully borne witness to by those who have followed in their track, and the fact of the book being day by day read by Johnson, during its preparation, gives it an additional value from the perfect veracity of its contents ’as I have resolved that the very journal which Dr Johnson read shall be presented to the publick, I will not expand the text in any considerable degree.’ If the way in which the Rambler roughed it, ’laughing to think of myself roving among the Hebrides at sixty, and wondering where I shall rove at four score,’ is admirable, none the less so is Bozzy’s imperturbable good humour. ’It is very convenient to travel with him,’ writes his companion from Auchinleck to Mrs Thrale, ’for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect. He has better faculties than I had imagined; more justness of discernment and more fecundity of images.’ They had hoped to go sailing from island to island, and had not reckoned with what Scott, who wonders they were not drowned, calls the proverbial carelessness of Hebridean boatmen. They really had come two months too late. But Boswell’s attention to the old man smoothed all difficulties, ’looking on the tour as a co-partnership between Dr Johnson and myself,’ he did his part faithfully, dancing reels, singing songs, and airing the scraps of Gaelic he picked up, thinking all this better than ’to play the abstract scholar.’

Johnson’s account of the journey is an able performance, and is written with a lighter touch and grace than is to be found in his early works. One passage from it has become famous, his description of Iona. ’The man whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona,’ rivals Macaulay’s New Zealander as a stock quotation, and the whole book is not without incisive touches. But it is completely eclipsed by the Journal of Boswell. From start to finish there is not a dull page, and the literary polish is, we venture to think, of a higher kind than is seen in the Life. The artistic opening, and the grouping of the characters, together with the wealth of archaeological and historical information, the tripping style and sustained interest, all render this book of Boswell’s a masterpiece. Johnson’s account, published in 1775, took ten years to reach a second edition. Boswell’s appeared in September, 1785; and by December 20 the issue was exhausted, a third followed on August 15, 1786, and the next year saw a German translation issued at Lubeck. There had been grave indiscretions, lack of reticence, and other faults in the book. Caricatures were rife. Revising for the Second Edition shewed Sir Alexander Macdonald seizing the author by the throat, and pointing with his stick to the open book, where two leaves are marked as torn out. But Boswell, in The Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1786, asserts that no such applications or threats had been made. The results, however, may have added to the writer’s unpopularity, as Lord Houghton suggests, at the Edinburgh bar, through the answers, replies, and other rejoinders to the strictures of Johnson, for which Boswell, as the pioneer and the introducer of the stranger, ‘the chiel among them takin’ notes,’ may in Edinburgh society have been held as mainly responsible.

To Johnson, the memories of the tour the lone shieling and the misty island were a source of pleasing recollection. Taken earlier, it would have removed many of his insular prejudices by wider survey and more varied conversation. ‘The expedition to the Hebrides,’ he wrote to Boswell some years after, ‘was the most pleasant journey I ever made;’ and two years later, after restless and tedious nights, he is found reverting to it and recalling the best night he had had these twenty years back, at Fort Augustus. Yet all through September they had not more than a day and a half of really good weather, and but the same during October. Out of such slight materials and uncomfortable surroundings has Boswell produced a masterpiece of descriptive writing. The memory of Johnson has lingered where that of the Jacobite Pretender has well-nigh completely passed away. Mr Gladstone, proposing a Parliamentary vote of thanks to Lord Napier for ’having planted the Standard of St George upon the mountains of Rasselas;’ Sir Robert Peel, quoting, in his address to Glasgow University as Lord Rector, Johnson’s description of Iona; Sir Walter Scott finding in Skye that he and his friends had in their memories, as the one typical association of the island, the ode to Mrs Thrale, all combine to shew the abiding interest attaching to the Rambler even in Abyssinia and to his foot-steps in Scotland.