The Tour to the Hebrides
"Dr Johnson" says Boswell at the beginning of his account of this famous tour "had for many years given me hopes that we should go together, and visit the Hebrides."
They had first discussed the project in a coffee-house in the Strand in 1763, Johnson being especially eager to see the patriarchal life of the Highlands—the clansmen living and working and fighting and dying under the fatherly rule of their chieftain. Boswell, knowing something of his friend's love of Fleet Street and of his prejudice against Scotland, "doubted that it would not be possible to prevail on Dr Johnson to relinquish the felicity of a London life."
"To Scotland, however, he ventured," and the faithful Boswell has left us a careful record of his adventures and his talk on each of the 100 days he spent there. This Journal was warmly praised by Johnson, who read the manuscript, and was published in the year after his death. Here we must be content with extracts, first following the travellers along the east coast of Scotland, where Johnson found the trees very few:
"On Saturday the fourteenth of August, 1773, late in the evening, I received a note from him, that he was arrived at Boyd's inn, at the head of the Canongate, [Edinburgh]. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially; and I exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually in Caledonia.... He was to do me the honour to lodge under my roof...."
"Mr Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm up the High-street, to my house in James's court: it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh.... Walking the streets ... at night was pretty perilous, and a good deal odoriferous. The peril is much abated, by the care which the magistrates have taken to enforce the city laws against throwing foul water from the windows; but from the structure of the houses in the old town, which consist of many stories, in each of which a different family lives, and there being no covered sewers, the odour still continues. A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr Johnson to be without one of his five senses upon this occasion. As we marched slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, 'I smell you in the dark.'"
Johnson and Boswell arm-in-arm up the High Street