[Footnote 36: Fitzgerald's _Life of Boswell_, ii, 76.]
[Footnote 37: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 318.]
[Footnote 38: Prior's _Life of Goldsmith_, i, 452-3.]
[Footnote 39: _Letters to Temple_, p. 165.]
[Footnote 40: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 95.]
Nothing in Boswell's life became him so well as his second important publication, 'The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.' The event took place in 1785, not many months after Johnson's death, and less than twelve years after the eventful journey when Johnson was displayed to his biographer's countrymen. The 'Tour' has already been mentioned here as an episode in Boswell's remarkable friendship. It was an episode, besides, in Boswell's life; it decided his destiny.
In the year 1785 Boswell was in the midst of his political schemes and ambitions. It was exactly in this period of his life that it was most important for him to win respect. Yet the 'Journal' revealed the whole severity of Johnson's criticisms upon Scotland and the Scotch; Boswell's position among his countrymen was certain to suffer, and did suffer very much by its publication. His candour triumphed by the event. His real self was expressed without compromise, at the expense of the respectable self which he cherished and cultivated. It matters very little how much Boswell foresaw the consequence. Probably he was not altogether unsuspicious, for Malone was at his side, and Malone was a man of the world.[1] In any case he did publish this amazing book, and he published it at a critical time. Just when he seemed to be deserting his genius and drifting into a world that was never intended for him, the vital truth of Boswell proved that it was irrepressible and saved him for Johnson, for himself, and for posterity.
Johnson and Boswell were typical travellers of the eighteenth century. They went in no romantic spirit to see the beauties of Nature in remote corners of the earth. 'He always said,' reports Boswell of the Doctor, 'that he was not come to Scotland to see fine places, of which there were enough in England, but wild objects, mountains, waterfalls, peculiar manners--in short, things which he had not seen before. I have a notion that he at no time has had much taste for rural beauties. I have myself very little.' This is a clear statement. They looked at 'wild objects' because they were unusual, and eschewed almost entirely scenery of a tamer spirit. They were interested in 'manners.' The Journal bears out this statement. Observations about the people of the country are part of the traveller's stock-in-trade, and they seem even to be one of the _raisons d'être_ of Boswell's book. In the same way the Journal is filled with archæological and historical speculations. Johnson's journey to the Western Islands is far more so, and seems to have been written almost entirely from this point of view. These were the absorbing interests of educated men, and travel was expected to furnish the occasion for 'an ordered series of learned observations.' To be convinced of the paramount importance of these interests in the eighteenth century one has only to glance at the periodicals of the time.