[Sidenote: JAMES’S COURT.]
“Boswell,” wrote Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, “has very handsome and
spacious rooms; level with the ground on one side of the house, and on
the other four stories high.” At this time he was living in James’s
Court, on the northern side of the Lawnmarket, having lately removed
from Chessel’s Buildings in the Canongate. It is not easy for the
stranger who passes from the thronged street under the low archway
into that quiet, but gloomy, and even shabby-looking court, to picture
to himself the gay and lively company which once frequented it. Now
ragged, bare-footed children are playing about; in some of the windows
there are broken and patched panes of glass, while high above one’s
head, from the different storeys, are hanging out to dry garments of
various sorts and hues, on a curious kind of framework, let down by a
pulley and string, till it stands out square from the wall. Some of
the houses are coloured with a yellow wash, in others the stones round
the windows and at the corners are painted red. The uncoloured stone
is a grey darkened by years of smoke. The lower windows are guarded by
iron gratings. On the southern, or Lawnmarket side, a block of building
juts out, and makes a division in the Court. This projection looks as
ancient as any part, and was doubtless there in those old days when the
place was inhabited by a select set of gentlemen, “who kept a clerk
to record their names and proceedings, had a scavenger of their own,
clubbed in many public measures, and had balls and assemblies among
themselves.”[405] It must have pleasantly recalled to Boswell the
chambers which had been lent him in the Temple that summer in which
he first became acquainted with Johnson, for it, too, was a nest of
lawyers. There were inhabiting it at this time thirteen advocates,
among them Lord Elibank, seven Writers to the Signet and Clerks of
Session, a Commissioner, and two first clerks of advocates. The other
householders were only six in number: two physicians, one of whom was
Sir John Pringle,[406] the President of the Royal Society of London, a
teller in the Old Bank, a teacher of French, a dancing-mistress, and
a gentlewoman. Pringle, who was Boswell’s intimate friend, was one of
“the three topics” which he begged Johnson to avoid at his father’s
house—Presbyterianism and Whiggism being the other two. If any one of
these subjects were introduced an altercation was certain to follow,
for all three were as dear to Lord Auchinleck as they were distasteful
to Johnson. Here Hume had lived till very lately in a house “which was
very cheerful and even elegant, but was too small,” he complained,
“to display his great talents for cookery.” Nevertheless it had been
the one spot to which, when abroad, his heart untravelled had fondly
turned. Even in the palace at Fontainebleau, while fresh from the
flattery of the three young princes who were in turn to be kings of
France, in this high tide of his fortune it was for “his easy-chair and
his retreat in James’s Court that twice or thrice a day” he longed.
Here he had welcomed Benjamin Franklin, here Adam Smith had been his
frequent guest, and here he had offered a shelter to Rousseau. In his
absence from Edinburgh Dr. Blair had been his tenant, and here, no
doubt, had written some of those sermons and lectures which were to
attain so wide a popularity, and then to sink into as deep a neglect.
The time once was when Blair’s shrine would have drawn a crowd of
pilgrims.
[Illustration: JAMES’S COURT.]
Hume and Boswell had for a short time been very near neighbours, as
it was in the same block of buildings[407] that they lived. If the
elder man had entertained the American patriot, Franklin, the younger
had entertained the Corsican patriot, Pascal Paoli. He could boast,
moreover, of the distinguished guests who thronged his house during
Johnson’s two visits, both at his first coming and on his return
from the Hebrides. Judges, and advocates who were destined one day
to sit on the bench, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief, men and women of
high birth, authors, divines, physicians, all came to see and hear
the famous Englishman. We can picture to ourselves the sedan-chairs
passing in under the low gateway, bearing the fine ladies and gentlemen
who came to attend “the _levée_ which he held from ten o’clock in the
morning till one or two.” The echo of the strong loud voice with the
slow deliberate utterance still almost seems to sound in our ears as
we wander about in this dreary spot. “I could not attend him,” writes
Boswell, “being obliged to be in the Court of Session; but my wife was
so good as to devote the greater part of the morning to the endless
task of pouring out tea for my friend and his visitors.”
More than one caller, as he gazed on the huge frame, the scarred face,
and the awkward strange movements of the man of whom they had heard so
much, might have exclaimed with Lord Elibank, that “hardly anything
seemed more improbable than to see Dr. Johnson in Scotland.” What
Edinburgh said and thought of him we should greatly like to know. But
no letters recording his visit seem to be extant. Even the very house
has disappeared. Time, which has spared everything else in this old
Court, has not spared it. More than thirty years ago it was burnt to
the ground. We should have liked to wander about the rooms, and wonder
which was the bedchamber that Mrs. Boswell, “to show all respect to the
Sage,” so politely resigned to him; and where it was that Veronica,
that precocious babe of four months, by wishing “to be held close to
him, gave a proof from simple nature that his figure was not horrid.”
Where, we should have asked, was the dinner given him at which Mrs.
Boswell did her best “to aid wisdom and wit by administering agreeable
sensations to the palate”? Where, too, were the carpets spread on which
he let the wax of the candles drop, by turning them with their heads
downwards when they did not burn bright enough? In what closet did
Boswell keep his books, whence on Sunday, with pious purpose, Johnson
took down Ogden’s Sermons, and retired with them to his own room? They
did not, however, detain him long, and he soon rejoined the company.
Which was the breakfast-room where Sir William Forbes introduced to him
the blind scholar and poet, Dr. Blacklock? “Dear Dr. Blacklock, I am
glad to see you,” he said, with a most humane complacency. “I looked
on him with reverence,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale. It has all utterly
passed away; Forbes himself has been Sir Walter Scott’s “lamented
Forbes”[408] for more than fourscore years. All has passed away; not
only the talk about Burke, and Garrick, and Hume, and Whitefield, and
genius, and witchcraft, and the comparative difficulty of verse-making
and dictionary-making; but even the very walls which might have caught
it in its echoes. Where this famous old house once stood now stands a
modern bank, contrasting but ill in its more elaborate architecture
with the severe, and even stern, simplicity of the ancient buildings.
Nevertheless we are at no loss to picture to ourselves the home of Hume
and Boswell. Their _land_ occupied one half of the northern side of the
Court; the other half, which no doubt corresponded with it in almost
every respect, happily escaped the flames. It is so solidly built that
if it is spared by the rage of fire and of modern improvement, it has
little to fear from time. Its situation, looking down as it does with
its northern front on the Mound, and the pleasant gardens in the valley
below, has kept it from sinking in public estimation so much as most of
the neighbouring buildings. It has indeed seen better days, but it has
not lost all the outward signs of respectability; its panes are neither
broken nor patched. The ground-floor, which was, we may assume, on the
same plan as Boswell’s house, is occupied by a bookbinder,[409] who
courteously showed me all over it. There were traces left in this busy
workshop of past splendour, and I could see how handsome and spacious
the rooms had once been. In the windows were deep recesses, where it
must have been pleasant enough on a bright summer’s day to sit in the
cool shade and look out over the heads of the elm trees waving below,
across the sparkling waters of the Forth, on the hills of Fife in the
far distance. A stone staircase, furnished with iron gates, led down
from the level of the Court to the street four storeys below, where the
foundations of this lofty pile are laid in the rock. The staircase had
its occupant, for at one of the windows a mat-maker was busy at his
trade.[410]
[Sidenote: MEMORIALS OF GREAT MEN.]
There is no memorial to remind passers-by of the men who have made
James’s Court so famous. The stranger, as he climbs up the Lawnmarket
to the Castle, is little likely to notice the obscure archway through
which so gay and bright and learned a company was ever passing to and
fro. In the public gardens Allan Ramsay, John Wilson and Adam Black
have each their statue. Viscount Melville’s column lifts its head in
St. Andrew’s Square, far above David Hume’s modest house, and in its
inscription, in all probability, lies. The virtues and the glories
of George IV. are lavishly commemorated. Even good Queen Charlotte
is not suffered to be forgotten. In Chambers Street the name of the
founder of _Chambers’ Journal_ is meant to live. On the finest site in
all Edinburgh the insignificance of the fifth Duke of Buccleugh will
struggle for immortality. We look in vain for the statue of David Hume,
of Adam Smith, and of James Boswell. What street, what square, what
bridge bear their names? Where does Edinburgh proudly boast to the
stranger that she is the birth-place of the philosopher whose name is
great in the history of the world, and of the biographer whose work has
never been equalled? Where does she make it known that to her ancient
city the author of the _Wealth of Nations_ retired to spend the closing
years of his life and to die? If no nobler monuments can be raised,
surely some bronze tablet or graven stone might keep fresh the memory
of the spot where Adam Smith had his chamber, where Benjamin Franklin
came to visit David Hume, where Rousseau was offered a shelter, and
where James Boswell’s guests were Pascal Paoli and Samuel Johnson.