HALF-HOURS IN THE CLUB LIBRARY.

"A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland," by Doctor Samuel Johnson. 2 vols. 1775.

BY JOHN BUCHAN.

THE Editor's command has made me get down from a top shelf a little squat duodecimo which I have not opened for many a year. I presume my copy is the first edition; at any rate it was issued in the year of the first edition, and though it is wrongly paged and bears an Irish imprint, the bookplate of the first Lord Sheffield would seem a guarantee of authenticity. I can scarcely think that a noted bibliophile like Gibbon's friend and editor would content himself with a pirated version. I read the book years ago in a fishing inn in Argyll, and it is, perhaps, scarcely a work which calls for frequent re-reading. The truth is that Johnson's "Journey to the Western Islands" compares ill with Boswell's "Tour to the Hebrides." Johnson was no picaresque chronicler of wayside humours, and he had not the art of that delightful form of literature which the French call carnets de voyage. He is no Borrow or Stevenson to reproduce for the fireside reader the glamour of travel, and, unlike Boswell, he is too modest, too dignified, to give us gossip. He tells of his adventures as the leader of an advance party might report to his commanding officer-an accurate but colourless itinerary. Indeed, it was as a leader of an advance party that he thought of himself, a scout sent forth from the coffee-houses of Town to report on the outer darkness of the North. If you want a parallel you will find it in that desiccated narrative, the "Anabasis" of Xenophon. Johnson was inspirited to risk the journey, Boswell tells us, by reading Martin's “Descrip

HALF-HOURS IN THE CLUB LIBRARY.

"A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland," by Doctor Samuel Johnson. 2 vols.

1775.

BY JOHN BUCHAN.

THE Editor's command has made me get down from a top shelf a little squat duodecimo which I have not opened for many a year. I presume my copy is the first edition; at any rate it was issued in the year of the first edition, and though it is wrongly paged and bears an Irish imprint, the bookplate of the first Lord Sheffield would seem a guarantee of authenticity. I can scarcely think that a noted bibliophile like Gibbon's friend and editor would content himself with a pirated version. I read the book years ago in a fishing inn in Argyll, and it is, perhaps, scarcely a work which calls for frequent re-reading. The truth is that Johnson's "Journey to the Western Islands" compares ill with Boswell's "Tour to the Hebrides." Johnson was no picaresque chronicler of wayside humours, and he had not the art of that delightful form of literature which the French call carnets de voyage. He is no Borrow or Stevenson to reproduce for the fireside reader the glamour of travel, and, unlike Boswell, he is too modest, too dignified, to give us gossip. He tells of his adventures as the leader of an advance party might report to his commanding officer-an accurate but colourless itinerary. Indeed, it was as a leader of an advance party that he thought of himself, a scout sent forth from the coffee-houses of Town to report on the outer darkness of the North. If you want a parallel you will find it in that desiccated narrative, the Anabasis" of Xenophon. Johnson was inspirited to risk the journey, Boswell tells us, by reading Martin's “Descrip

tion of the Western Islands of Scotland." Martin was a Skyeman, and his exceedingly dull work was first issued in 1703. The world about 1770 was beginning to talk about the "life of nature," and speculate on sociology. Johnson's purpose was more than half-scientific. The Highlands were the nearest approach to the free and barbaric natural existence about which eighteenth-century litterati talked wisely and knew nothing. The honest old Doctor had a conscience beyond his contemporaries; he determined to go and see. So at the age of sixty-four he packed his bag, hoisted his huge body on a horse, and set off like a boy on his first expedition, sacrificing all the comforts of Fleet Street, agreeable and admiring ladies, and innumerable cups of tea. Who can withhold admiration from a spirit so candid and indomitable?

But even if the purpose of the journey had been less courageous, the record of it might merit our attention for its own sake. It is a masterpiece of pure and stately English. I do not know any work in which the style is a finer example of Augustan prose at its best. Then, again, Johnson's was an intelligence of the first order, and his comments are never negligible. He might be lacking sometimes in knowledge, but, like Alan Breck, he never failed in "penetration." So we may welcome the inspiration in the Lochaber glen which prompted the work. is his own account :

Here

"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 by hindering the eye from ranging forced the mind to find entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well, I know not; for here I first conceived the thought of this narration."

Boswell has described for us the traveller. "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." We can imagine that after a debauch of Edinburgh intellectual society he was not sorry to get on the road again. He travelled light, and had no reason to regret it in a land where "that which is not mountain is commonly bog."

"It is not to be imagined without experience," he tells us, "how in climbing crags, and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder and a little weight will burthen; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself."

What the doctor's baggage consisted of we are not told; Boswell, we know, was accompanied by a volume of sermons, a map of Scotland, and a Bible.

We may pass rapidly over the earlier stages of the journey among the sour cornlands of Fife and the Mearns. At St Andrews they had a spate of professors and much meditation among ruins. At Montrose, to Johnson's surprise, they found an English chapel with an organ! In Aberdeen the Doctor was given an honorary degree, and observed that the women of the lower classes were "visibly employed " knitting stockings. He visited the Bullers of Buchan, and considered that Slains Castle might be a good place to realise the Lucretian situation, “Suave mari magno," &c. The treelessness of Scotland oppressed him. "I had now travelled two hundred miles in Scotland and seen only one tree not younger than myself." Another saddening fact was that the windows in the houses seemed to be designed not to open. "He that would have his window. open must hold it with his hand, unless what may be sometimes found among good contrivers, there be a nail which he may stick into a hole, to keep it from falling." He still complained of crumpled roseleaves, for he had not sampled Highland shielings and the Outer Isles.

At Nairn, according to his own view, he entered the Highlands, for there he first saw peat fires and heard Gaelic.