The following anecdotes are related by, or relate to, the well-known
James Boswell, who conducted Dr. Johnson to the Highlands of Scotland.
It may be recollected that when Boswell took the doctor to his father’s
house, the old laird of Auchinleck remarked, that “Jamie had brought an
odd kind o’ a chiel’ wi’ him.” “Sir,” said Boswell, “he is the grand
luminary of our hemisphere,--quite a _constellation_, sir.”--“_Ursa
Major_, (the Great Bear,) I suppose,” said the laird.
Some snip-snap wit was wont to pass between sire and son. “Jamie” was
bred an advocate, and sometimes pleaded at the bar. Pleading, on a
particular occasion, before his father, who, at that time, was “Ordinary
on the bills,” and saying something which his lordship did not like, he
exclaimed to Jamie, “Ye’re an ass, mon.”--“No, my lord,” replied Jamie,
“I am not an ass, but I am a colt, the foal of an ass!”
In 1785, Boswell addressed “a Letter to the People of Scotland” on a
proposed alteration in the court of session. He says in this pamphlet,
“When a man of probity and spirit, a lord Newhall, whose character is
ably drawn in prose by the late lord president Arniston, and elegantly
in verse by Mr. Hamilton of Bangour,--when such a man sits among our
judges, should they be disposed to do wrong, he can make them hear and
tremble. My honoured father told me, (the late lord Auchinleck,) that
sir Walter Pringle ‘spoke as one having authority’--even when he was at
the bar, ‘he would _cram a decision_ down their throats.’”
Boswell tells, in the same “Letter,” that “Duncan Forbes of Culloden,
when lord president of the court, gave every day as a toast at his
table, ‘Here’s to every lord of session who does not deserve to be
hanged!’ Lord Auchinleck and lord Monboddo, both judges, but since his
time, are my authority,” says Boswell, “for this.--I do not say that the
toast was very delicate, or even quite decent, but it may give some
notion what sort of judges there _may_ be.”
It is further related by Boswell, that a person was executed to please
his laird. “Before the heritable jurisdictions were abolished, a man was
tried for his life in the court of one of the chieftains. The jury were
going to bring him in ‘not guilty,’ but somebody whispered them, that
‘the young _laird_ had never seen an execution,’ upon which their
verdict was--‘_death_;’ and the man was hanged _accordingly_.”
This is only to be paralleled by the story of the highland dame, whose
sense of submission to the chief of her clan induced her to insinuate
want of proper respect in her husband, who had been condemned, and
showed some reluctance to the halter. “Git up, Donald,” said the “guid
wife,” to her “ain guid man,” “Git up, Donald, and be hangit, an’ dinna
_anger_ the laird.”
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