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