It appears that one of the immediately succeeding leaseholders of
Hume’s house in James’s Court was James Boswell. Mr Burton has made
this tolerably clear (_Life of Hume_, ii. 137), and he proceeds to
speculate on the fact of Boswell having there entertained his friend
Johnson. ‘Would Boswell communicate the fact, or tell what manner
of man was the landlord of the habitation into which he had, under
the guise of hospitality, entrapped the arch-intolerant? Who shall
appreciate the mental conflict which Boswell may have experienced on
this occasion?’ It appears, however, that by the time when Johnson
visited Boswell in James’s Court, the latter had removed into a better
and larger mansion right below and on the level of the court—namely,
that now (1846) occupied by Messrs Pillans as a printing-office. This
was an extraordinary house in its day; for it consisted of two floors
connected by an internal stair. Here it was that the Ursa Major of
literature stayed for a few days, in August 1773, while preparing to
set out to the Hebrides, and also for some time after his return. Here
did he receive the homage of the trembling literati of Edinburgh; here,
after handling them in his rough manner, did he relax in play with
little Miss Veronica, whom Boswell promised to consider peculiarly in
his will for showing a liking to so estimable a man. What makes all
this evident is a passage in a letter of Samuel himself to Mrs Thrale
(Edinburgh, August 17), where he says: ‘Boswell has very handsome and
spacious rooms, level with the ground on one side of the house, and on
the other four stories high.’ Boswell was only tenant of the mansion.
It affords a curious idea of the importance which formerly attached to
some of these Old Town residences, when we learn that this was part of
the entailed estate of the Macdowalls of Logan, one of whom sold it,
by permission of an act of parliament, to redeem the land-tax upon his
country property.
Boswell ceased to be a citizen of Edinburgh in 1785, when he was
pleased to venture before the English bar. He is little remembered
amongst the elder inhabitants of our city; but the late Mr William
Macfarlane, the well-known small-debt judge, told me that there was
_this_ peculiarity about him—it was impossible to look in his face
without being moved by the comicality which always reigned upon it. He
was one of those men whose very look is provocative of mirth. Mr Robert
Sym, W.S., who died in 1844, at an advanced age, remembered being at
parties in this house in Boswell’s time.