TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES. 1773
'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.