[Sidenote: BEGINNING OF THE TOUR.]
On Friday, August 6th, 1773, Dr. Johnson set off from London on his
famous tour to the Western Islands of Scotland. His companion as far
as Newcastle was Robert Chambers, Principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford,
who had been lately appointed one of the new judges for India, and was
going down to his native town to take leave of his family. The two
friends travelled in a post-chaise. “Life has not many better things
than this,” said Johnson once when he was driven rapidly along in one
with Boswell.[388] It was too costly a pleasure for him to indulge in
often unless he could find a companion to share the expense. The charge
for a chaise and pair of horses for two passengers from London to
Edinburgh could scarcely have been kept under twenty-two pounds.[389]
The weather was bright and hot.[390] At Newcastle Chambers’s place in
the chaise was taken by a fellow-townsman who was destined to go far
beyond him in the career of the law—William Scott, afterwards Lord
Stowell, the great judge of the High Court of Admiralty. The travellers
entered Scotland by Berwick-on-Tweed, passing near to those nine wells
which gave their name to the estate which had come down to David Hume’s
father through many generations. Very likely they dined at Dunbar, that
“high and windy town,” and thought, as they crossed the Brocksburn,
how Cromwell’s horse and foot charged across it in the mingled light
of the harvest-moon and the early dawn on that September morning one
hundred and twenty-three years before. Their next stage would bring
them to Haddington, past the ruined Abbey where nearly a hundred years
later that great Scotchman, Johnson’s foremost champion, was often
with a contrite and almost broken heart to seek his wife’s grave in
the desolate chancel. As they drove on they passed by the wide plain,
shut in by the sea on one side and by a morass on the other, over
which, only twenty-eight years earlier, on another misty morning in
September, the rude Highlanders had chased Cope’s English Dragoons in
shameful and headlong flight. Evening had overtaken the travellers by
this time, so that they could not have seen “the one solitary thorn
bush round which lay the greatest number of slain,” or the grey tower
of the church of Preston Pans, whence the afternoon before the battle,
young Alexander Carlyle had looked down upon the two armies.[391]
They passed Pinkie, where the Protector Somerset’s soldiers had made
such a savage massacre of the routed Scotch; and Carberry Hill, where
Mary took her last farewell of Bothwell as she gave herself up to the
Scottish lords. They passed, too, the serfs of Tranent and Preston
Pans, “the colliers and salters who were in a state of slavery and
bondage, bound to the collieries or salt-works for life.”[392]
[Illustration: WHITE HORSE CLOSE.]
[Sidenote: THE ROAD TO EDINBURGH.]
[Sidenote: THE WHITE HORSE INN.]
Entering Edinburgh by the road which goes near Holyrood House, and
driving along the Canongate, they alighted at the entrance to White
Horse Close, at the end of which stood the White Horse Inn. The sign,
the crest of the house of Hanover, had probably been adopted on the
accession of George I., and was a proof of loyalty to the reigning
family. In London in the year 1761 there were forty-nine alleys, lanes
and yards which were so called.[393] It was, however, said that the
name had been given as a memorial of a white horse which, by winning
a race on Leith Sands, had saved its master, the inn-keeper, from
ruin.[394] According to the Scotch custom the inn was generally known
not by its sign, but by the name of its landlord.[395] Thus Boswell
calls this house Boyd’s Inn. In the _Edinburgh Directory_ for 1773-4 we
find under the letter B, at the head of the _Stablers_, “Boyd, James,
canongate head.” In the present time, when an inn, however small,
assumes the dignified title of _Hotel_, we may admire the modesty of
these Edinburgh innkeepers, not one of whom, pretended to be anything
more than a stabler. In fact they scarcely deserved any higher name;
their houses were on a level with the inn at Rochester where the two
carriers in Falstaff’s time passed so restless a night. A traveller
who had stayed in this house a year or two before Johnson’s visit,
described it as being “crowded and confused. The master lives in the
stable, the mistress is not equal to the business. You must not expect
breakfast before nine o’clock, and you must think yourself happy if you
do not find every room fresh mopped.”[396] The date of 1683 inscribed
upon the large window above the outside steps,[397] showed that even
in Johnson’s time it was an old house. For the whole of the eighteenth
century it was one of the chief starting places for the stage-coaches.
It sank later on into a carrier’s inn, says Sir Walter Scott, “and
has since been held unworthy even of that occupation. It was a base
hovel.”[398] Yet James Boyd, who kept it, retired with a fortune of
several thousand pounds. That he possessed napery to the value of five
hundred pounds is stated by Chambers to be a well-authenticated fact.
“A large room in the house was the frequent scene of the marriages of
runaway English couples. On one of the windows were scratched the words:
‘Jeremiah and Sarah Bentham, 1768.’”[399]
It was from this miserable inn that Johnson, on August 14th, sent the
following note to Boswell’s house:
“Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just
arrived at Boyd’s.
“Saturday night.”
Boswell went to him directly, and learnt from Scott that “the Doctor
had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then
drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter;
upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of
sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of
the window. Scott said he was afraid that he would have knocked the
waiter down.” Boswell at once carried off Johnson to his own house.
Scott he left behind with the sincere regret that he had not also a
room for him. Could the future eminence of the great judge have been
foreseen, or had his “amiable manners” been generally known, surely
some one would have been found eager to welcome him as a guest and
rescue him from the Canongate Stabler. “He was one of the pleasantest
men I ever knew,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, fifty-five years later,
when he met him at a dinner at Richmond Park, “looking very frail and
even comatose.”[400] He lived some while longer, and did not die till
the memory of this jaunt, and of everything else had been lost in the
forgetfulness in which his mind sank beneath the burthen of fourscore
years and ten.[401] Let us hope that on his first visit to Edinburgh,
like Matthew Bramble, “he got decent lodgings in the house of a widow
gentlewoman.”[402]
The old inn still stands, a picturesque ruin and an interesting
memorial of the discomfort of a long race of wandering strangers. No
one here ever repeated with emotion, either great or small, Shenstone’s
lines:
“Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.”[403]
With a little care it could have been made a place where “a man might
take his ease in his inn,” for it stood aloof from the noise of the
street, was well-built and was sufficiently roomy. An outside stone
staircase, which after a few steps turned right and left, led up to the
first floor, where doubtless, according to the common Scotch custom,
the principal rooms were placed. With its turrets and its gables it
must have looked pleasant enough to the young runaway couples as they
hurried in from the Canongate, and passed the outside staircases and
open galleries of the houses on each side of the Close, and so went up
to the large room where many a name was scratched with a diamond ring
on the pane. “And they are gone,” gone like the lovers of St. Agnes’
Eve.[404]