INTRODUCTION.

traveller who passed through the Hebrides in the year 1786 recorded that in many houses he was given the room to sleep in which had been occupied by Dr. Johnson.[1] Twenty-eight years later, when Sir Walter Scott with some of his friends landed in Skye, it was found on inquiry that the first thought which had come into each man’s mind was of Johnson’s Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale.[2] The Highlanders at Dunvegan, Scott goes on to say, saw that about Johnson there was something worthy of respect, “they could not tell what, and long spoke of him as the Sassenach mohr, or big Englishman.”[3] He still lives among them, mainly, no doubt, by his own and Boswell’s books, but partly also by tradition. Very few of the houses remain where he visited. Nevertheless, in two of these in the Hebrides, and in one in the Lowlands, I was shown his bedroom. Proud, indeed, would the old man have been could he have foreseen that an Englishman who followed on his steps one hundred and sixteen years later would be shown at New Hailes, at Rasay, and at Dunvegan, “Dr. Johnson’s Chamber.” At Rasay is preserved his walking-stick—not the famous “piece of timber” which was destined for some museum, but was stolen or lost in Mull, but one which he had occasionally used. In his bedroom an engraving of him hangs on the wall. The china tea-set out of which he had drunk is preserved by a descendant of the laird who was his host. At Dunvegan his portrait is set up in a post of honour in the noble drawing-room of the famous old castle, and his autograph letter to Macleod of Macleod rests among the ancient memorials of that still more ancient family. That it is endorsed “Dr. Johnston’s Letter” may be twisted into a compliment. So popular was he that his very name was “Scottified.”

In many places I found traditions of him still remaining—some, no doubt, true; others false. But whether false or true, by their vitality they show the deep mark which the man made as he passed along. In Glenmorison there are countryfolk who profess to know by the report of their forefathers the “clear rivulet” in “the narrow valley, not very flowery but sufficiently verdant,” where Johnson reposed on “a bank such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign, and first conceived the thought of the narration” of his tour.[4] In a farmhouse on Loch Duich, just below the mountain which exhausted his patience and good-humour, and nearly exhausted his strength, I was told of the speech which he made as he reached the top of the pass. “He turned as he was beginning the descent, and said to the mountain, ‘Good-bye, Ma’am Rattachan, I hope never to see your face again.’”[5] From Rasay a friendly correspondent wrote to tell me how the great man had climbed up Dun Can, the highest mountain in the island, and had danced on the top. I have pointed out that it was Boswell and not Johnson who performed this feat, but the tradition, doubtless, will linger on. At Dunvegan Miss Macleod of Macleod, who remembers her grandmother, Johnson’s hostess, and her aunts, “the four daughters, who knew all the arts of southern elegance, and all the modes of English economy,”[6] has preserved some traditions more worthy of trust. “One day,” she said, “he had scolded the maid for not getting good peats, and had gone out in the rain to the stack to fetch in some himself.[7] He caught a bad cold. Lady Macleod went up to his room to see how he was, and found him in bed, with his wig turned inside out, and the wrong end foremost, serving the purpose of ‘a cap by night,’ like the stocking of Goldsmith’s Author. On her return to the drawing-room, she said, ‘I have often seen very plain people, but anything as ugly as Dr. Johnson, with his wig thus stuck on, I never have seen.’[8] She was (her granddaughter added) greatly pleased with his talk, for she had seen enough of the world to enjoy it; but her daughters, who were still quite girls, disliked him much, and called him a bear.”

At the inn at Broadford, sitting in the entrance-hall, I fell into talk with an elderly man, a retired exciseman, who lived close by. He, too, had his traditions of the Sassenach mohr. His father had known an old lady, blind of one eye, who was fond of telling how in her childhood, at the time of Johnson’s visit, she had been watching the dancing in that famous farmhouse of Corrichatachin, where Boswell got so drunk one night over the punch, and so penitent the next morning over a severe headache and the Epistle for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity.[9] A large brass button on the coat-tail of one of the dancers had struck her in her eye as he whirled round and had so injured it that she lost the sight. My informant had a story also to tell of the learned minister, the Rev. Donald Macqueen, who accompanied Johnson in part of his tour. “A crofter seeing the two men pass, asked the minister who was his companion. Macqueen replied, ‘The man who made the English language.’ ‘Then he had very little to do,’ rejoined the crofter; meaning, according to the Gaelic idiom, that he might have been much better employed.” My friendly exciseman had known also an old lady who remembered Johnson coming to her father’s house in Mull. According to a custom once very common in the Highlands, though even in those days passing fast away, she had been sent for three or four years to a shepherd’s hut to be fostered. It was shortly after her return home that Johnson’s visit was paid. He did not hide his displeasure at the roughness which still clung to her. She had not forgotten, moreover, how he found fault with the large candles, rudely made of pieces of old cloth twisted round and dipped in tallow.[10] My acquaintance ended his talk by saying: “If Dr. Johnson had returned to Scotland after publishing his book, he would have got a crack on his skull.”

At Craignure, in the Isle of Mull, the landlord of the little inn had his story to tell of the untimely death of young Maclean of Col, that “amiable man,” who, while the pages of Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands “were preparing to attest his virtues, perished in the passage between Ulva and Inch-Kenneth.”[11] My host’s great-grandmother, a Macquarrie of Ulva, on the night when the boat was upset, had been watching the cattle near the fatal shore. An old woman who was to have been her companion had failed her, so that she was alone. She saw nothing, and heard no cries. “A half-witted person,” my informant added, in a serious voice, “had warned one of the party not to go; but his warning was not heeded, and the man lost his life.”

At Lochbuie two traditions, I found, had been preserved in the family of the laird, the great-grandson of that Maclean of Lochbuie whom Boswell had heard described as “a great roaring braggadocio,” but found only “a bluff, comely, noisy old gentleman. He bawled out to Johnson (as Boswell tells us), ‘Are you of the Johnstons of Glencroe or of Ardnamurchan?’ Dr. Johnson gave him a significant look, but made no answer.”[12] The report has come down in the family that Johnson replied that he was neither one nor the other. Whereupon Lochbuie cried out, “Damn it, Sir, then you must be a bastard.” There can, I fear, be no doubt that this rejoinder belongs to those excellens impromptus à loisir in which Rousseau excelled[13]—that esprit de l’escalier, as the French describe it. If the laird, like Addison, could draw for a thousand pounds, he had, I suspect, but nine pence in ready money.[14] For had this repartee been made at the time, and not been merely an after-invention, Boswell most certainly would not have let it pass unrecorded. The second tradition is scarcely more trustworthy. Johnson at the tea-table, I was told, helped himself to sugar with his fingers, whereupon Lady Lochbuie at once had the basin emptied, and fresh sugar brought in. He said nothing at the time, but when he had finished his tea he flung down the cup, exclaiming that if he had polluted one he had also polluted the other. A lady of the family of Lochbuie, whose memory goes back ninety years, in recounting this story when I was in Scotland, added, “But I do not know whether it was true.” That it was not true I have little doubt. In the first place, we have again Boswell’s silence; in the second place, to the minor decencies of life Johnson was by no means inattentive. At Paris he was on the point of refusing a cup of coffee because the footman had put in the sugar with his fingers; and at Edinburgh, in a passion, he threw a glass of lemonade out of the window because it had been sweetened in the same manner by the waiter. In one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale he expressed his displeasure in Skye at the very practice with which he is charged a few weeks later in Mull. Describing his visit to the house of Sir Alexander Macdonald, he wrote: “The lady had not the common decencies of her tea-table: we picked up our sugar with our fingers.”[15]

It is strange that while in Mull, that “most dolorous country,” that “gloom of desolation,” as Johnson described it, these stories of him are preserved, the boatman who took me across the narrow passage between it and Inch-Kenneth had no traditionary knowledge of his host, Sir Allan Maclean, and of his retirement in that little island. To the forefathers of the men of Mull the head of the Macleans would have been an object of reverence and even of fear, and Johnson only a passing wonder. “I would cut my bones for him,” said one of his clan, speaking of Sir Allan in Boswell’s hearing.[16] But of the Highland chief who lived among them no remembrance remains, while the Sassenach mohr, who spent but a few days in the island-home of the Macleans, is still almost “a household word.”

I was indeed surprised to find through the Highlands and the Hebrides how much he still remained in men’s thoughts. On Loch Lomond, the boatman who rowed me to the islands on which he had landed, a man of reading and intelligence, said that though he had himself read Johnson’s Journey, yet “Scotchmen still feel too sore to like reading him.” Whatever soreness still lingers is, I have little doubt, much more due to his sarcasms recorded by Boswell than to any passages in his own narrative. But it is surprising that Scotchmen cannot more generally join in a hearty laugh at his humorous sallies, though they are at their own expense. That the Scotch of a hundred years and more ago were over-sensitive is not astonishing. At that time in most respects they were still far behind England. It was England that they were striving to follow in their arts, their commerce, and their agriculture. It was the English accent that they were striving to catch, and the English style in which they laboured to write. It was to the judgment of Englishmen that their authors, no small or inglorious band, anxiously appealed. That they should be sensitive to criticism beyond even the Americans of our day was not unnatural. For in the poverty of their soil, and the rudiments of their manufactures and trade, they found none of that boastful comfort which supports the citizen of the United States, even when he is most solicitous of English approbation. But at the present day, when they are in most respects abreast of Englishmen, and in some even ahead, they should disprove the charge that is brought against them of wanting humour by showing that they can enjoy a hearty laugh, even though it goes against them. Johnson’s ill-humour did not go deep, and, no doubt, was often laughed away. Of that rancour which disgraced Hume his nature was wholly incapable. He wished no ill to Scotland as Hume wished ill to England.[17] “He returned from it,” writes Boswell, “in great good-humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated.”[18]

Not all Scotch critics were hostile towards him. The Scots Magazine, which last century was to Edinburgh what the Gentleman’s Magazine was to London, always spoke of him with great respect. Writing of him early in the year in which he visited Scotland, it says:

In the two reviews of his Journey in the same magazine, there is not one word of censure; neither when Boswell, eleven years later, brought out his account of the tour, had they any fault to find. In the character which they drew of Johnson on his death they leave unnoticed his attacks on Scotland. They are even generous in their praise. Speaking of his pension they say: “It would have been a national disgrace if such talents, distinguished by such writings, had met with no other recompense than the empty consciousness of fame.”[20] There were also men of eminence in Scotland who at once acknowledged the merits of the book. “I love the benevolence of the author,” said Lord Hailes.[21] The “virtuous and candid Dempster,” the “patriotic Knox,” Tytler, the historian, “a Scot, if ever a Scot there were,” had each his word of high praise.[22] Sir Walter Scott, writing many years later, said: “I am far from being of the number of those angry Scotsmen who imputed to Johnson’s national prejudices all or a great part of the report he has given of our country. I remember the Highlands ten or twelve years later, and no one can conceive of how much that could have been easily remedied travellers had to complain.”[23]

These men, nevertheless, formed a small minority. The outcry that was raised against Johnson was at once loud and bitter. To attacks for many a long year he had been used, but yet this time he was startled. “He expressed his wonder at the extreme jealousy of the Scotch, and their resentment at having their country described as it really was.”[24] Boswell mentions “the brutal reflections thrown out against him,” and “the rancour with which he was assailed by numbers of shallow irritable North Britons.”[25] How quickly the storm gathered and burst is shown in a letter written by an Englishman from Edinburgh a few days after the book was published:

The “patriotic Knox,” as Boswell calls him, the author of A Tour through the Highlands and Hebride Isles in 1786, a man freer from prejudices than the common run, and one who readily acknowledged the merits of Johnson’s book, bears equal witness to the wrath of his countrymen.

To us, who know Johnson better than we know any other author who has ever lived, the charge of literary jealousy seems ridiculous. But Knox lived before Boswell’s Life was published. Scotland, in which learning and even literature had slumbered for nearly a century, had started up from her long sleep, and was bent on turning the Auld Reekie into the Modern Athens. All her geese were swans, though of swans she had at this season a fair flock. “Edinburgh is a hotbed of genius,” wrote Smollett, shortly before Johnson’s visit, and as a proof of it he instanced among “authors of the first distinction,” Wallace, Blair, Wilkie, and Ferguson. Hume still earlier had proclaimed that at last there was “a hope of seeing good tragedies in the English language,” for Johnny Home had written his Douglas. Wilkie of the Epigoniad, the great historian held, was to be the Homer, and Blacklock the Pindar, of Scotland.[28] But it was in Ossian Macpherson that the hopes of the country had at one time soared highest. By Dr. Blair, the Edinburgh Professor of Rhetoric, he had been ranked with Homer and Virgil.[29] The national pride, the honour of Scotland, was concerned, and the meanest motive was attributed to the man who had ventured to pronounce his poems an impudent forgery. Macpherson was a dangerous enemy. Against “the menaces of a ruffian” a thick cudgel might avail; but the secret arts of a literary forger were not so easily baffled. His position was one of great power, for from the Court he received a pension at first of £600 a year, and afterwards of £800, “to supervise the newspapers. He inserted what lies he pleased, and prevented whatever he disapproved of being printed.”[30] It was from this tainted source that no doubt sprang many of “the miserable cavillings against the Journey in newspapers, magazines, and other fugitive pieces.”[31] These, as Boswell tells us, “only furnished Johnson with sport.” Nevertheless, though they did not trouble his mind, they marred the fame of his book, and prejudiced not only the immediate, but even the traditional judgment of Scotland. Enough dirt was thrown, and some of it did stick and sticks still. Lies were sent wandering through the land, and some of them have not even yet found their everlasting rest. One disgusting story, not unworthy of the inventive genius of Ossian himself, is still a solace to Scots of the baser sort. That it is a lie can be plainly proved, for it rests on a supposed constant suspicion in Johnson of the food provided for him. Now we know from his own writings that only twice in his tour had he “found any reason to complain of a Scottish table.”[32] Moreover, in his letters to Mrs. Thrale and in Boswell’s Journal, we can follow his course with great accuracy and minuteness. Had there been any foundation for this lie it must be found on the road between Inverness and the seashore. Now we know what meals he had at each station. Even in the miserable inn at Glenelg, where his accommodation was at its worst, if he had chosen he could have had mutton chops and freshly-killed poultry. Finding both too tough, he supped on a lemon and a piece of bread.

The attacks of the angry critics, published as they were in fugitive pieces, might have been forgotten had they not been revived three or four years later in “a scurrilous volume,” as Boswell justly describes it, “larger than Johnson’s own, filled with malignant abuse under a name real or fictitious of some low man in an obscure corner of Scotland, though supposed to be the work of another Scotchman, who has found means to make himself well known both in Scotland and England.”[33] The “low man” was the Rev. Donald M’Nicol, and the “obscure corner” that long and pleasant island of Lismore which the steamers skirt every summer day as they pass with their load of tourists between Oban and the entrance of the Caledonian Canal. M’Nicol’s predecessor in the manse was the Rev. John Macaulay, whose famous grandson, Lord Macaulay, was to rebuke those “foolish and ignorant Scotchmen, who moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy in the Journey to the Western Islands, assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their country with libels much more dishonourable to their country than anything that he had ever said or written.”[34] When Johnson was shown M’Nicol’s book he said: “This fellow must be a blockhead. They don’t know how to go about their abuse. Who will read a five shilling book against me? No, Sir, if they had wit, they should have kept pelting me with pamphlets.” The book, however, seems to have been widely read, and in the year 1817 was reprinted at Glasgow in a fine large type. A Scotch gentleman recently told me that he fears that to many of his countrymen Johnson’s tour is only known through M’Nicol’s attack.

It was Macpherson at whom Boswell aimed a blow when he wrote of the “other Scotchman whose work it was supposed to be.” If Ossian had no hand in it himself, it was certainly written by someone fired with all his hatred of the man who had branded him as a forger. Johnson is described as “a man of some reputation for letters, whose master-passion was hatred of Scotland. When the Poems of Ossian were published, and became the delight and admiration of the learned over all Europe, his cynical disposition instantly took the alarm.”[35] It was from this time that “we may date the origin of his intended tour to Scotland.” It was from malice that he started so late in the year—a malice, by the way, which nearly brought him to a watery grave. “It was not beauties he went to find out in Scotland, but defects; and for the northern situation of the Hebrides the advanced time of the year suited his purpose best.”[36] Johnson, with a discretion which other travellers in like circumstances would do well to imitate, had passed over Edinburgh with the remark that it is “a city too well known to admit description.” This wise reticence is twisted into a proof of malevolence. So, too, is the brevity with which he mentions Dundee. “We stopped awhile at Dundee,” he recorded, “where I remember nothing remarkable.”[37] Surely this is a very innocent sentence. Even Boswell, whose record was generally far fuller, dismisses this place with three words. “We saw Dundee,” he says.[38] But M’Nicol at once discovered the miserable jealousy of the Englishman. “He passes very rapidly through the town of Dundee, for fear, I suppose, of being obliged to take notice of its increasing trade.”[39] How delicately Johnson treated this town in his published narrative is shown by his description of it in his private letter to Mrs. Thrale. To her he had written: “We came to Dundee, a dirty despicable town.”[40] Much as M’Nicol belaboured Johnson, he could not refrain from claiming him as of Scotch origin. “We are much deceived by fame,” he wrote, “if a very near ancestor of his, who was a native of that country, did not find to his cost that a tree was not quite such a rarity in his days.”[41] This mysterious hero of the gallows was no doubt no Johnson at all, but a Johnston—of Ardnamurchan, probably, or of Glencroe.[42]

M’Nicol is ingenious in his treatment of the great Ossian controversy. “The poems,” he says, “must be the production either of Ossian or Mr. Macpherson. Dr. Johnson does not vouchsafe to tell us who else was the author, and consequently the national claim remains perfectly entire. The moment Mr. Macpherson ceases to be admitted as a translator, he instantly acquires a title to the original.”[43] Granted that he was a ruffian who had tried by menaces to hinder the detection of a cheat. What of that? He was a great original ruffian, and his cheat was a work of great original genius. So that Caledonia, if she had one forger the more, had not one poet the less. She made up in genius what she lost in character. But this Dr. Johnson failed to see, being, poor man, “naturally pompous and vain, and ridiculously ambitious of an exclusive reputation in letters.” It must have been this same pomposity, vanity, and ambition which led him to say of these poems: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”[44]

That Johnson’s narrative should have roused resentment is not surprising. Even his friend Beattie, “much as he loved and revered him,” yet found in it “some asperities that seem to be the effect of national prejudice.”[45] That “this true-born Englishman,” as Boswell delights to call him, should have given a wholly unprejudiced account of any country not his own was an impossibility. As regards Scotland, the position which he took certainly admitted of justification. “When I find,” he said, “a Scotchman to whom an Englishman is as a Scotchman, that Scotchman shall be as an Englishman to me.”[46] Boswell, and perhaps Boswell alone, exactly answered this requirement, and the two men were fast friends. For many other Scotchmen, indeed, he had strong feelings of regard, and even of friendship—for Andrew Millar the bookseller, for William Strahan the printer, for Blair, Beattie, John Campbell, Hailes, and Robertson, among authors, and for his poor assistants in the great work of his Dictionary, who all came from across the Tweed. There was no want of individual affection, no John Bull disinclination that had to be overcome in the case of each fresh acquaintance which he made. His “was a prejudice of the head and not of the heart.”[47] He held that the Scotch, with that clannishness which is found in almost equal strength in the outlying parts of the whole island, in Cornwall and in Cumberland, achieved for themselves in England “a success which rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit.”[48] Jesting with a friend from Ireland, who feared “he might treat the people of that country more unfavourably than he had done the Scotch,” he answered, “Sir, you have no reason to be afraid of me. The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir: the Irish are a fair people;—they never speak well of one another.”[49] To Boswell he began a letter, not meant, of course, for the public eye, by saying: “Knowing as you do the disposition of your countrymen to tell lies in favour of each other.”[50] When he came to write his Journey, he was led neither by timidity nor false delicacy to conceal what he thought. He attacks that “national combination so invidious that their friends cannot defend it,” which is one of the means whereby Scotchmen “find, or make their way to employment, riches, and distinction.”[51] He upbraids that “vigilance of jealousy which never goes to sleep,”[52] which sometimes led them to cross the borders of boastfulness and pass into falsehood, when Caledonia was their subject and Englishmen their audience. “A Scotchman,” he writes, “must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth; he will always love it better than inquiry.”[53] Even in his talk when among Scotchmen he was inclined “to expatiate rather too strongly upon the benefits derived to their country from the Union.”[54] “‘We have taught you,’ said he, ‘and we’ll do the same in time to all barbarous nations, to the Cherokees, and at last to the Ouran-Outangs,’ laughing with as much glee as if Monboddo had been present. Boswell. ‘We had wine before the Union.’ Johnson. ‘No, Sir; you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not make you drunk.’ Boswell. ‘I assure you, Sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness.’ Johnson. ‘No, Sir; there were people who died of dropsies, which they contracted in trying to get drunk.’”[55]

Such pleasantry as this could hardly have given offence to anyone into whose skull a jest could penetrate by any operation short of a surgical one. But it was a very different matter when the spoken jest passed into a serious expression of opinion in print. All the theoretic philosophy of which Scotland justly boasts was hardly sufficient to support with patience such a passage as the following: “Till the Union made the Scots acquainted with English manners the culture of their lands was unskilful, and their domestic life unformed; their tables were coarse as the feasts of Esquimaux, and their houses filthy as the cottages of Hottentots.”[56] His attacks on the Highlanders would have been read with patience, if not with pleasure, in Lowland circles. “His account of the Isles,” wrote Beattie, “is, I dare say, very just. I never was there.”[57] These were not the “asperities” of which that amiable poet complained. Yet they were asperities which might have provoked an incensed Highlander to give the author “a crack on his skull,” had he looked not to the general tenour of the narrative, but to a few rough passages scattered up and down. M’Nicol would surely have roused the anger of his countrymen to a fiercer heat had he forborne to falsify Johnson’s words, and strung together instead a row of his sarcastic sayings. The offensive passages are not indeed numerous, but out of such a collection as the following irritation enough might have been provided: “the genuine improvidence of savages;”[58] “a muddy mixture of pride and ignorance;”[59] “the chiefs gradually degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords;”[60] “the animating rabble”[61] by which of old a chief was attended; “the rude speech of a barbarous people;”[62] “the laxity of their conversation, by which the inquirer, by a kind of intellectual retrogradation, knows less as he hears more;”[63] “the Caledonian bigotry” which helps “an inaccurate auditor” to believe in the genuineness of Ossian.[64]

To the sarcasms which had their foundation in Johnson’s dislike of Presbyterianism Lowlanders and Highlanders were equally exposed. On Knox and “the ruffians of reformation”[65] he has no mercy. It is true that he maintains that “we read with as little emotion the violence of Knox and his followers as the irruptions of Alaric and the Goths.”[66] But how deeply he was moved Boswell shows, where he describes him among the ruins of the once glorious magnificence of St. Andrews. “I happened to ask where John Knox was buried. Dr. Johnson burst out, ‘I hope in the high-way. I have been looking at his reformations.’”[67] The sight of the ruined houses of prayer in Skye drew from him the assertion that “the malignant influence of Calvinism has blasted ceremony and decency together.”[68] In another passage he describes the ancient “epidemical enthusiasm compounded of sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity, which, in a people whom idleness resigned to their own thoughts, was long transmitted in its full strength from the old to the young.”[69] Even for this inveterate ill a cure had at length been found. “By trade and intercourse with England it is visibly abating.”

By the passages in which he described the bareness of the eastern coast the most irritation was caused. The very hedges were of stone, and not a tree was to be seen that was not younger than himself. “A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice.”[70] For this he was handled as roughly as Joseph’s brethren. He was little better than a spy who had come to see the nakedness of the land. The Scotchmen of that day could not know, as we know now, that “he treated Scotland no worse than he did even his best friends, whose characters he used to give as they appeared to him both in light and shade. ‘He was fond of discrimination,’ said Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘which he could not show without pointing out the bad as well as the good in every character.’”[71] If in his narrative he has not spared the shade, every fair-minded reader must allow that he has not been sparing of the light. John Wesley, who had often travelled over the same ground as far as Inverness, on May 18, 1776, recorded in his Journal at Aberdeen: “I read over Dr. Johnson’s Tour to the Western Isles. It is a very curious book, wrote with admirable sense, and, I think, great fidelity; although in some respects he is thought to bear hard on the nation, which I am satisfied he never intended.”[72]

That Johnson was not careless of the good opinion of the Scotch is shown by his eagerness to learn what Boswell had to tell him about the book. “Let me know as fast as you read it how you like it; and let me know if any mistake is committed, or anything important left out.”[73] A week later he wrote: “I long to hear how you like the book; it is, I think, much liked here.” The modesty of the closing passage of his narrative should have done something towards disarming criticism. “Having passed my time almost wholly in cities, I may have been surprised by modes of life and appearances of nature that are familiar to men of wider survey and more varied conversation. Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little.”[74] The compliment which he paid to the society of the capital must surely have won some hearts. “I passed some days in Edinburgh,” he wrote, “with men of learning whose names want no advancement from my commemoration, or with women of elegance, which perhaps disclaims a pedant’s praise.”[75] He never lets slip an opportunity of gracefully acknowledging civilities and acts of kindness, or of celebrating worth and learning. As he closed his book, so he had opened it with a well-turned compliment. It was, he said, Boswell’s “acuteness and gaiety of conversation and civility of manners which induced him to undertake the journey.”[76] He praises the kindness with which he was gratified by the professors of St. Andrews, and “the elegance of lettered hospitality” with which he was entertained.[77] At Aberdeen the same grateful heart is seen. Among the professors he found one whom he had known twenty years earlier in London. “Such unexpected renewals of acquaintance may be numbered among the most pleasing incidents of life. The knowledge of one professor soon procured me the notice of the rest, and I did not want any token of regard.”[78] He had the freedom of the city conferred upon him. In acknowledging the honour he compliments the town at the expense of England, by mentioning a circumstance which, he says, “I am afraid I should not have had to say of any city south of the Tweed; I found no petty officer bowing for a fee.”[79] With Lord Monboddo he was never on friendly terms. “I knew that they did not love each other,” writes Boswell, with a studied softness of expression. Yet Johnson in his narrative praises “the magnetism of his conversation.”[80] With Lord Auchinleck he had that violent altercation which the unfortunate piety of the son forbade the biographer to exhibit for the entertainment of the public. Nevertheless, he only mentions his antagonist to compliment him.[81] If he attacked Presbyterianism, yet to the Presbyterian ministers in the Hebrides he was unsparing of his praise. He celebrates their learning, which was the more admirable as they were men “who had no motive to study but generous curiosity or desire of usefulness.”[82] However much he differed from “the learned Mr. Macqueen” about Ossian, yet he admits that “his knowledge and politeness give him a title equally to kindness and respect.”[83] With the aged minister of Col he had a wrangle over Bayle, and Clarke, and Leibnitz. “Had he been softer with this venerable old man,” writes Boswell, “we might have had more conversation.”[84] This rebuke Johnson read in Boswell’s manuscript. The amends which he makes is surely ample. He describes the minister’s “look of venerable dignity, excelling what I remember in any other man. I lost some of his goodwill by treating a heretical writer with more regard than in his opinion a heretic could deserve. I honoured his orthodoxy, and did not much censure his asperity. A man who has settled his opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his conviction disturbed; and at seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.”[85]