Note 2: — Chapter VII

If the 'Tour to the Hebrides' is uniquely indiscreet, it is only the more typical of Boswell. He loved to be in the public eye and he was now notorious beyond measure. The wags laughed, the injured Scotsmen were angry, and the more respectable parts of the community were profoundly shocked. A sheaf of cartoons did justice to the humour of the situation. Lord Macdonald was represented with uplifted stick, and the threatened author on his knees before him.2 'Johnson's Ghost' was depicted as appearing to the terror-stricken Boswell and mournfully reproaching him. In a series of twenty large caricatures the biographer was represented in twenty absurd situations, and each sketch had a quotation from his book. Boswell at all events was the first in the field of all who intended to write about Johnson, and no doubt he was glad that all the world was aware of the fact.