Books: Incongruous Crusoe

BOSWELL'S JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES WITH SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (520 pp.)—Edited by Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett—McGraw-Hill ($10).

Boswell's matchless life of Dr. Johnson made rather small potatoes of their engaging tour together through the Hebrides. But the tour was unforgettable in many ways—and this eighth volume of Yale University's edition of Boswell's papers lets the reader count the ways. It pictures Johnson—the most ungainly of oldsters, the most nearsighted of onlookers, the most sedentary of talkers, the most fanatical of Londoners—perched atop tiny horses, half-drowned in pitching vessels, sleeping in chilly barns and clambering over rocks...