hnson
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