It was in good company that Johnson, on the morning of Monday, August
16, “walked out to see some of the things which they had to show
in Edinburgh,” for he was under the guidance of the historian of
Scotland. “I love Robertson,” Johnson had said a few years earlier,
“and I won’t talk of his book.” If Boswell had reported any part of
this saying we may hope that it was only the first half, for he who
neglects the author makes but a poor recompense by loving the man. At
all events, Robertson was not troubled with diffidence, for at Holyrood
“he fluently harangued” his companion on the scenes described in his
History. No doubt he told many of those anecdotes for which Johnson
that morning had declared his love as they breakfasted together, and
took care not to attempt “to weave them into a system.” [Sidenote: THE
LAWNMARKET.] As they passed into the Lawnmarket they had not before
them that wide expanse which in the present day makes so noble an end
to the High Street. The view was obstructed by the Weigh House, the
Luckenbooths, the Tolbooth, and the Guard House.[411] At the Weigh
House the boast, perhaps, was made that so great was the trade of the
town that the public weighing-machine which was there kept brought in
no less than a sum of £500 every year. At the Tolbooth and the Guard
House, that “long low ugly building,” which looked like “a black snail
crawling up the High Street,”[412] something, perhaps, was said of
the Porteous riots. But the real story of the Heart of Mid-Lothian
could only have been told them by that little child of scarce two
years in the College Wynd, how the wild mob on that September night,
seven-and-thirty years before, burnt down the massive gate of the jail,
and dragged their wretched prisoner by torchlight to the gallows,
and how Jeanie Deans could not tell a lie even to save her sister
from a shameful death. There was no one but this bright-eyed boy who
could have even pointed out in the Luckenbooths the stall where poor
Peter Peebles and Paul Plainstanes had for years carried on “that
great line of business as mercers and linendrapers,” which in the
end led to a lawsuit that is famous all the world over. [Sidenote:
PARLIAMENT HOUSE.] Having no one to tell them of all this they passed
on through Parliament Close, “which new-fangled affectation has termed
a square,”[413] to the Parliament House, which still showed “the grave
grey hue that had been breathed over it by one hundred and fifty
years,” and which was still free from the disgrace of “bright freestone
and contemptible decorations.” The “sorrow and indignation,” which the
restorer’s wanton changes aroused troubled a later generation.[414]
Here it was that the Court of Session sat, the High Court of Justice
of Scotland. It was in these August days empty of lawyers, for the
Vacation had just begun; but Johnson on his return saw it also in term
time, and thought “the pleading too vehement and too much addressed
to the passions of the judges. It was not the Areopagus,” he said.
Here Henry Erskine, the brother of the famous Chancellor, slipped a
shilling into Boswell’s hands, who had introduced him to Johnson,
saying that it was for the sight of his bear, and here Lord Auchinleck,
seeing the great man enter, whispered to one of his brethren on the
Bench that it was _Ursa Major_. In the Outer Hall had once sat the
ancient Parliament of Scotland. Here it was that Lord Belhaven, at
perhaps its last meeting, made that pathetic speech which drew tears
from the audience. Here every day during term time there was a very
Babel of a Court of Justice. Like Westminster Hall of old it was the
tribunal of many judges, as well as the gathering ground of advocates,
solicitors, suitors, witnesses, and idlers in general. Here it was that
“the Macer shouted with all his well-remembered brazen strength of
lungs: “Poor Peter Peebles _versus_ Plainstanes, _per_ Dumtoustie _et_
Tough:—Maister Da-a-niel Dumtoustie.”” Here it was that a famous but
portly wag of later days, “Peter” Robinson, seeing Scott with his tall
conical white head passing through, called out to the briefless crowd
about the fire-place, “Hush, boys, here comes old Peveril—I see the
Peak.” Scott looked round and replied, “Ay, ay, my man, as weel Peveril
o’ the Peak ony day as Peter o’ the Painch” (paunch).[415] Here Thomas
Carlyle, a student of the University, not yet fourteen years old, on
the afternoon of the November day on which he first saw Edinburgh, “was
dragged in to a scene” which he never forgot:
“An immense hall, dimly lighted from the top of the walls,
and perhaps with candles burning in it here and there, all
in strange _chiaroscuro_, and filled with what I thought
(exaggeratively) a thousand or two of human creatures, all
astir in a boundless buzz of talk, and simmering about in every
direction, some solitary, some in groups. By degrees I noticed
that some were in wig and black gown, some not, but in common
clothes, all well dressed; that here and there on the sides
of the hall, were little thrones with enclosures, and steps
leading up, red-velvet figures sitting in said thrones, and
the black-gowned eagerly speaking to them; advocates pleading
to judges as I easily understood. How they could be heard in
such a grinding din was somewhat a mystery. Higher up on the
walls, stuck there like swallows in their nests, sate other
humbler figures. These I found were the sources of certain
wildly plangent lamentable kinds of sounds or echoes which from
time to time pierced the universal noise of feet and voices,
and rose unintelligibly above it, as if in the bitterness
of incurable woe. Criers of the Court, I gradually came to
understand. And this was Themis in her ‘Outer House,’ such a
scene of chaotic din and hurlyburly as I had never figured
before.”[416]
Here every year, on the evening of the King’s birthday, there was
a scene of loyal riot. At the cost of the city funds, some fifteen
hundred guests, on the invitation of the magistrates, “roaring,
drinking, toasting, and quarrelling,” drank the royal healths to a late
hour of the night. “The wreck and the fumes of that hot and scandalous
night” tainted the air of the Court for a whole week.[417] From the
Hall our travellers passed into the Inner House, where the fifteen
judges sat together as “a Court of Review.” Like Carlyle, Johnson saw
“great Law Lords this and that, great advocates, _alors célèbres_, as
Thiers has it.” There were Hailes, and Kames, and Monboddo, on the
Bench, and Henry Dundas, Solicitor General. The judges wore long robes
of scarlet faced with white, but though their dignity was great, their
salaries were small when compared with those paid to their brethren
in Westminster Hall. The President had but £1,300 a year, and each
of the fourteen Lords of Session but £700. Six of them, among whom
was Boswell’s father, received each £300 more as a Commissioner of
Justiciary.[418] The room, or rather “den,” in which they sat, “was so
cased in venerable dirt that it was impossible to say whether it had
ever been painted. Dismal though the hole was, the old fellows who had
been bred there never looked so well anywhere else.”[419]
In the same great pile of buildings as the Law Courts is the Advocates’
Library, “of which Dr. Johnson took a cursory view.” He, no doubt,
“respectfully remembered” there its former librarian, Thomas Ruddiman,
“that excellent man and eminent scholar,” just as he remembered him
a few days later at Laurencekirk, the scene of his labours as a
schoolmaster. Perhaps a second time he “regretted that his farewell
letter to the Faculty of Advocates when he resigned the office of their
Librarian, was not, as it should have been, in Latin.” According to
Ruddiman’s successor, David Hume, it was but “a petty office of forty
or fifty guineas a year,” yet “a genteel one” too. When that great
writer came to write his letter of resignation, he used the curtest of
English, and took care to express his contempt for the Curators. Two or
three years earlier they had censured him for buying some French books,
which they accounted “indecent and unworthy of a place in a learned
library,” and he had not forgiven them.[420] It was in the _Laigh_ (or
Under) Parliament House beneath, in which at this time were deposited
the records of Scotland, that Johnson, “rolling about in this old
magazine of antiquities,” uttered those memorable words which have
overcome the reluctance or the indolence of many an author: “A man may
write at any time if he will set himself _doggedly_ to it.”
[Sidenote: ST. GILES’S CHURCH.]
It was but a step from the Parliament House to the great church of
St. Giles. Perhaps Johnson went round by the eastern end, and mourned
over the fate which had befallen Dunedin’s Cross less than twenty
years before. A full century and more was to pass away before “the
work of the Vandals” was undone, as far as it could be undone, by the
pious affection of one of the greatest of Scotchmen.[421] Perhaps he
turned to the west, and passed, little recking it, over the grave of
John Knox. Even Boswell, Edinburgh-born though he was, did not know
where the great Reformer lay buried, and a few days later asked where
the spot was. “‘I hope in the highway,’ Dr. Johnson burst out.” In
the pavement of Parliament Close, a “way of common trade,” a small
stone inscribed “I. K. 1572,” marks where he rests. St. Giles’ was at
this time “divided into four places of Presbyterian worship. ‘Come,’
said Johnson jocularly to Dr. Robertson, ‘let me see what was once
a church.’” Writing to Mrs. Thrale the next day he said: “I told
Robertson I wished to see the cathedral because it had once been a
church.” Its “original magnificence,” the loss of which Boswell justly
lamented, has been partly restored by the lavish changes of late years.
Nevertheless, the student of history may in his turn lament that in
this restoration there has of necessity disappeared much that was
interesting. “There was swept away, with as much indifference as if
it had been of yesterday, that plain, square, galleried apartment,”
which, as the meeting-place of the General Assembly, “had beheld the
best exertions of the best men in the Kingdom ever since the year
1640.”[422] Jenny Geddes and her stool, moreover, are reluctant to
answer the summons of the imagination in a scene which she herself
would scarcely have recognized. Johnson went into only one of the four
divisions, the New, or the High Church, as it was beginning to be
called. Here Blair was preaching those sermons which passed through
editions almost innumerable, and now can be bought in their calf
binding for a few pence at almost any bookstall. [Sidenote: SCOTCH
CHURCHES.] The New Church was formed out of the ancient choir. In it
were ranged the seats of the King, the judges, and the magistrates
of the city. When Johnson saw it, “it was shamefully dirty. He said
nothing at the time; but when he came to the great door of the Royal
Infirmary, where upon a board was this inscription, ‘Clean your feet,’
he turned about slily and said, ‘There is no occasion for putting this
at the doors of your churches.’” Pennant also had noticed “the slovenly
and indecent manner in which Presbytery kept the houses of God. In many
parts of Scotland,” he said, “our Lord seems still to be worshipped
in a stable, and often in a very wretched one.”[423] Nevertheless,
it seemed likely that some improvement would soon be made, and that
orthodoxy and dirt would not be held inseparable companions. In one or
two highly favoured spots the broom and scrubbing-brush had, perhaps,
already made their appearance; for according to Smollett “the good
people of Edinburgh no longer thought dirt and cobwebs essential to the
house of God.”[424] It might still have been impossible “for the united
rhetoric of mankind to prevail with Jack to make himself clean;”[425]
yet example must at last have an effect. Scotchmen had travelled
and had returned from their travels, and no doubt had brought back
a certain love for decency and cleanliness even in churches. In one
respect, it was noticed, they surpassed their neighbours. Their conduct
during service was more becoming. “They did not make their bows and
cringes in the middle of their very prayers as was done in England.”
They always waited till the sermon was over and the blessing given
before they looked round and made their civilities to their friends and
persons of distinction.[426]
I inquired in vain when I was in Edinburgh for the Post-house
Stairs, down which Johnson on leaving St. Giles was taken to the
Cowgate. Together with so much that was ancient they have long since
disappeared. He was now at the foot of the highest building in the
town. As he turned round and looked upwards he saw a house that rose
above him thirteen storeys high, being built like James’s Court on a
steep slope. It has suffered the same fate as Boswell’s house, having
been destroyed by fire more than sixty years ago.[427] [Sidenote:
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY.] From the Cowgate Robertson led the way up the
steep hill to the College of which he was the Principal. They passed
through “that narrow dismal alley,” the College Wynd, famous to all
time as the birthplace of Sir Walter Scott. Johnson would have been
pleased indeed could he have known how that bright young genius would
one day delight in his poems, and how the last line of manuscript that
he was to send to the press would be a quotation from the _Vanity of
Human Wishes_.[428] “Hæ miseriæ nostræ,” were the melancholy words
which Robertson uttered as he showed his companion the mean buildings
in which his illustrious University was lodged. Johnson, in the
narrative of his tour, no doubt remembering what he saw both here and
at St. Andrew’s, grieved over a nation which, “while its merchants or
its nobles are raising palaces suffers its universities to moulder
into dust.” Robertson, in an eloquent _Memorial_, had lately pleaded
the cause of learning. The courts and buildings of the College were
so mean, he said, that a stranger would mistake them for almshouses.
Instead of a spacious quadrangle there were three paltry divisions,
encompassed partly with a range of low and even of ruinous houses,
and partly with walls which threatened destruction to the passers-by.
Boswell tells of one portion of the wall which, bulging out, was
supposed, like “Bacon’s mansion,” to “tremble o’er the head” of every
scholar, being destined to fall when a man of extraordinary learning
should go under it. It had lately been taken down. “They were afraid
it never would fall,” said Johnson, glad of an opportunity to have a
pleasant hit at Scottish learning. In spite of its poverty and the
meanness of its buildings, such was the general reputation of the
University, above all of the School of Medicine, that students flocked
to it from all parts of Great Britain and Ireland, from the English
settlements in North America and the West Indies, and even from distant
countries in Europe. Their number at this time was not less than six
or seven hundred; by 1789 it had risen to one thousand and ninety. The
Principal did not allow himself to be soothed into negligence by this
success. He grieved that “with a literary education should be connected
in youth ideas of poverty, meanness, dirtiness, and darkness.” The sum
of money which he asked for was not large in a country whose wealth
was so rapidly increasing. For £6,500—not quite double the amount
which he had been lately paid for his _History of Charles V._—sixteen
“teaching rooms” could be provided, while £8,500 more would supply
everything else that was needed. Yet it was not till 1789 that the
foundation stone was laid of the New College of Edinburgh. Happily
Robertson was spared to play his part on that great day. Preceded
by the Mace, with the Professor of Divinity on his right hand, and
the Professor of Church History on his left, followed by the rest of
his colleagues according to seniority, and by the students, each man
wearing a sprig of green laurel in his hat, he headed the procession of
the University.[429]
However mean were the buildings in general, with the library Johnson
was much pleased. Fifty years earlier a traveller had noticed that “the
books in it were cloistered with doors of wire which none could open
but the keeper, more commodious than the multitude of chains used in
the English libraries.”[430] I was surprised to find that so late as
1723 the use of chains was generally continued in England. Yet about
that time one of the Scotch exhibitioners at Balliol College reported
that the knives and forks were chained to the tables in the Hall,[431]
so that it was likely that at least as great care was taken with
books of value. Johnson’s attention does not seem to have been drawn
to an inscription over one of the doors, which the French traveller,
Saint-Fond, read with surprise—MUSIS ET CHRISTO. Had he noticed it, it
would scarcely have failed to draw forth some remark.
[Illustration: THE OLD LIBRARY.]
From the College the party went on to the Royal Infirmary. In the
Bodleian Library I have found a copy of the _History and Statutes_ of
that institution printed in 1749. In it is given a table of the three
kinds of diet which the patients were to have—“low, middle, and full.”
The only vegetable food allowed was oatmeal and barley-meal, rice
and panado.[432] There was no tea, coffee, or cocoa. The only drink
was ale, but in “low diet” it was not to be taken. It is to be hoped
that the Infirmary was not under the same severe ecclesiastical
discipline as the workhouse. There the first failure to attend Divine
worship was to be followed by the loss of the next meal, while for
the second failure the culprit was “to be denied victuals for a whole
day.”[433]
[Illustration: INCH KEITH
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
[Sidenote: HOLYROOD HOUSE.]
The last sight which Johnson was shown in his “running about Edinburgh”
was the Abbey of Holyrood House, “that deserted mansion of royalty,” as
Boswell calls it with a sigh. It was more the absence of a charwoman
than of a king that was likely to rouse the regrets of an Englishman.
“The stately rooms,” wrote Wesley, “are dirty as stables.”[434] Even
the chapel was in a state of “miserable neglect.”[435] It was in
Holyrood that Robertson “fluently harangued” on the scenes of Scottish
history. In the room in which David Rizzio was murdered “Johnson was
overheard repeating in a kind of muttering tone, a line of the old
ballad, _Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night_:
‘And ran him through the fair body.’”
The mood in which he was when he made so odd a quotation was perhaps no
less natural than Burns’s when he wrote:
“With awe-struck thought and pitying tears,
I view that noble, stately dome,
Where Scotia’s kings of other years
Famed heroes, had their royal home.”[436]
The Castle, that “rough, rude fortress,” was not visited by Johnson
till his return in November. He owned that it was “a great place;”
yet a few days after he affected to despise it, when Lord Elibank was
talking of it with the natural elation of a Scotchman. “It would,” he
said, “make a good prison in England.” Perhaps there was not so much
affectation as Boswell thought, for Johnson believed, he said, that the
ruins of some one of the castles which the English built in Wales would
supply materials for all those which he saw beyond the Tweed.[437]