On the whole, however, Johnson bore his fatigues well, preserved his temper, and made sensible remarks upon men and things.  The pair started from Edinburgh in the middle of August, 1773; they went north along the eastern coast, through St. Andrew’s, Aberdeen, Banff, Fort George, and Inverness.  There they took to horses, rode to Glenelg, and took boat for Skye, where they landed on the 2nd of September.  They visited Rothsay, Col, Mull, and Iona, and after some dangerous sailing got to the mainland at Oban on October 2nd.  Thence they proceeded by Inverary and Loch Lomond to Glasgow; and after paying a visit to Boswell’s paternal mansion at Auchinleck in Ayrshire, returned to Edinburgh in November.  It were too long to narrate their adventures at length, or to describe in detail how Johnson grieved over traces of the iconoclastic zeal of Knox’s disciples, seriously investigated stories of second-sight, cross-examined and brow-beat credulous believers in the authenticity of Ossian, and felt his piety grow warm among the ruins of Iona.  Once or twice, when the temper of the travellers was tried by the various worries incident to their position, poor Boswell came in for some severe blows.  But he was happy, feeling, as he remarks, like a dog who has run away with a large piece of meat, and is devouring it peacefully in a corner by himself.  Boswell’s spirits were irrepressible.  On hearing a drum beat for dinner at Fort George, he says, with a Pepys-like touch, “I for a little while fancied myself a military man, and it pleased me.”  He got scandalously drunk on one occasion, and showed reprehensible levity on others.  He bored Johnson by inquiring too curiously into his reasons for not wearing a nightcap—­a subject which seems to have interested him profoundly; he permitted himself to say in his journal that he was so much pleased with some pretty ladies’ maids at the Duke of Argyll’s, that he felt he could “have been a knight-errant for them,” and his “venerable fellow-traveller” read the passage without censuring his levity.  The great man himself could be equally volatile.  “I have often thought,” he observed one day, to Boswell’s amusement, “that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns”—­as more cleanly.  The pair agreed in trying to stimulate the feudal zeal of various Highland chiefs with whom they came in contact, and who were unreasonable enough to show a hankering after the luxuries of civilization.

Though Johnson seems to have been generally on his best behaviour, he had a rough encounter or two with some of the more civilized natives.  Boswell piloted him safely through a visit to Lord Monboddo, a man of real ability, though the proprietor of crochets as eccentric as Johnson’s, and consequently divided from him by strong mutual prejudices.  At Auchinleck he was less fortunate.  The old laird, who was the staunchest of Whigs, had not relished his son’s hero-worship.  “There is nae hope for Jamie, mon; Jamie is gaen clean gyte.