Johnson's account of the journey is an able performance, and is written with a lighter touch and grace than is to be found in his early works. One passage from it has become famous,--his description of Iona. 'The man whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona,' rivals Macaulay's New Zealander as a stock quotation, and the whole book is not without incisive touches. But it is completely eclipsed by the _Journal_ of Boswell. From start to finish there is not a dull page, and the literary polish is, we venture to think, of a higher kind than is seen in the _Life_. The artistic opening, and the grouping of the characters, together with the wealth of archaeological and historical information, the tripping style and sustained interest, all render this book of Boswell's a masterpiece. Johnson's account, published in 1775, took ten years to reach a second edition. Boswell's appeared in September, 1785; and by December 20 the issue was exhausted, a third followed on August 15, 1786, and the next year saw a German translation issued at Lubeck. There had been grave indiscretions, lack of reticence, and other faults in the book. Caricatures were rife. _Revising for the Second Edition_ shewed Sir Alexander Macdonald seizing the author by the throat, and pointing with his stick to the open book, where two leaves are marked as torn out. But Boswell, in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ for March 1786, asserts that no such applications or threats had been made. The results, however, may have added to the writer's unpopularity, as Lord Houghton suggests, at the Edinburgh bar, through the answers, replies, and other rejoinders to the strictures of Johnson, for which Boswell, as the pioneer and the introducer of the stranger, 'the chiel among them takin' notes,' may in Edinburgh society have been held as mainly responsible.