He had fulfilled his long-cherished wish, and no wonder his spirits were high. His father, the old Lichfield bookseller, had put into his hands when he was very young Martin's Description of the Western Islands, and had thus roused his youthful fancy.[1] His longing to visit the wild scenes of which he had read in his childhood would in all likelihood have remained ungratified, had it not been for Boswell. He had known that lively young gentleman but a very few weeks, when, over supper "in a private room at the Turk's Head Coffee-house in the Strand," he promised to accompany him to the Hebrides.[2] Ten years elapsed before the promise was fulfilled. "I cannot but laugh," he said at Armidale in Skye, "to think of myself roving among the Hebrides at sixty.[3] I
ARMIDALE
wonder where I shall rove at four-score."[4] To Mrs. Thrale soon after his birthday he wrote: "You remember the Doge of Genoa, who being asked what struck him most at the French Court, answered, 'Myself.' I cannot think many things here more likely to affect the fancy, than to see Johnson ending his sixty-fourth year in the wilderness of the Hebrides."[5] "Little did I once think," he wrote another day, "of seeing this region of obscurity, and little did you once expect a salutation from this verge of European life. I have now the pleasure of going where nobody goes, and seeing what nobody sees."[6] So close to this verge did Mrs. Thrale suppose he was, that she thought that he was in sight of Iceland.[7] She and his friends of the Mitre or the Literary Club would have been astonished could they have
