Late in the afternoon our travellers drove on to Aberdeen. “We had
tedious driving,” writes Boswell, “and were somewhat drowsy.” Though
they “travelled with the gentle pace of a Scotch driver,” nevertheless
Johnson, much as he delighted in the rapid motion of the English
post-chaise, bore this journey of five-and-twenty miles with greater
philosophy than his friend. “We did not,” he writes, “affect the
impatience we did not feel, but were satisfied with the company of each
other—as well riding in the chaise as sitting at an inn.” It was not
far short of midnight when they arrived at Aberdeen. [Sidenote:
THE NEW INN AT ABERDEEN.] The “New Inn” at which they stopped
was full, they were told. “This was comfortless.” Fortunately
Boswell’s father, when on circuit, always put up there for the
five nights during which he was required by law to stay in each
assize town.[509] The son was recognized by his likeness to the
father, and a room was soon provided. “Mr. Boswell’s name,” writes
Johnson, “overpowered all objection, and we found a very good
house, and civil treatment.” A few weeks later the old judge went
this same circuit. “Two men being indicted before him at Aberdeen
on September 30 for petty thefts, petitioned, and were banished to
the plantations for life, their service adjudged for seven years to
the transporter.”[510] What these poor wretches had “petitioned”
was that they might be transported instead of being hanged. The
“transporter,” who bore the cost of shipping them to America,
was rewarded for his outlay by having the use of them as slaves
for seven years. At the end of that time they would have their
freedom; but if they returned to Scotland, and were seized, in all
likelihood they would have been sent to the gallows under their old
sentence. It is not at all improbable that these two thieves were
in the town prison at the very time of our travellers’ visit. If
so, they were separated from them merely by a wall or two; for the
“New Inn” formed part of the same block of buildings as the common
prison. In the central tower the ordinary prisoners were confined,
two rooms in the western end being reserved for burgesses, “or any
of the better rank who were committed for debt.”[511] The judge in
all the festivities of his circuit dinner was often close to some
poor wretch whom that same day he had sentenced to the gallows, and
who was awaiting his dreadful end in the gloom and misery of his
dismal cell.
[Sidenote: ABERDEEN TOWN HOUSE.]
On the other side of the tower, but in the same block, was the Town
House, or Town Hall as we should call it in England. When I was in
Aberdeen, a man of whom I asked the way to the Town Hall, replied that
he did not know where it was; but when I corrected myself, and asked
for the Town House, he at once showed it me. [Sidenote: THE FREEDOM OF
THE CITY.] Here it was that the freedom of the city was conferred on
Johnson.
“At one o’clock (writes Boswell) we waited on the magistrates
in the town-hall, as they had invited us in order to present
Dr. Johnson with the freedom of the town, which Provost Jopp
did with a very good grace. Dr. Johnson was much pleased with
this mark of attention, and received it very politely. There
was a pretty numerous company assembled. It was striking
to hear all of them drinking, ‘Dr. Johnson! Dr. Johnson!’
in the town-hall of Aberdeen, and then to see him with his
burgess-ticket, or diploma, in his hat, which he wore as he
walked along the street, according to the usual custom.”
The hall in which the ceremony was performed was a room “46 feet long,
29 broad, and 18 high, with five large windows in front, with many
elegant sconces double-branched set round it, and three diamond-cut
crystal lustres hanging from the roof.”[512] It has been swept away
with the New Inn and the prison, and replaced by the stately pile
which rises on the old site. The Scotch towns last century seem to
have been somewhat lavish in the honours which they conferred. Pennant
was made a freeman of at least three or four places. Monck Berkeley,
the St. Andrew’s student, had the freedom of Aberdeen and some other
towns presented to him, though he was scarcely nineteen when he left
Scotland. Like the dutiful young gentleman that he was, “he constantly
presented the diplomas to his mother requesting her to take great care
of them.”[513] George Colman the younger, who, at the age of eighteen
was sent to King’s College, says in his _Random Records_:[514] “I had
scarcely been a week in Old Aberdeen, when the Lord Provost of the New
Town invited me to drink wine with him one evening in the Town Hall;
there I found a numerous company assembled. The object of this meeting
was soon declared to me by the Lord Provost, who drank my health,
and presented me with the freedom of the city.” Two of his English
fellow-students, of a little older standing, had received the same
honour. A suspicion rises in the mind that it was sometimes not so much
a desire to confer honour as to drink wine at the public expense which
stirred up these town-councillors. Nevertheless, the testimony of an
English gentleman, who a few years earlier had been made a citizen of
Glasgow, goes far towards freeing them from so injurious a supposition.
“The magistrates,” he wrote, “are all men of so reasonable a size, and
so clear of all marks of gluttony and drunkenness, that I could hardly
believe them to be a mayor and aldermen.”[515] With the distinction
itself, on whatever account it was given, Johnson was greatly pleased.
“I was presented,” he wrote, “with the freedom of the city, not in a
gold box, but in good Latin. Let me pay Scotland one just praise; there
was no officer gaping for a fee; this could have been said of no city
on the English side of the Tweed.” In his own University of Oxford the
fee for the honorary degree of D.C.L. used to be ten guineas. Cox,
the Esquire Bedel, records in his _Recollections of Oxford_, how glum
Canning looked when he was called on to pay it.[516] Wesley, who in the
April of the previous year had been made a freeman of Perth, praised
the Latinity in which the honour was conferred on him. “I doubt,” he
wrote, “whether any diploma from the City of London be more pompous or
expressed in better Latin.”[517]
The burgess-ticket or parchment on which the freedom was inscribed,
after being read aloud in the hall, was made into a roll, and, with the
appending seal, was tied on to the new citizen’s hat with red riband.
“I wore,” wrote Johnson, “my patent of freedom _pro more_ in my hat
from the new town to the old, about a mile.” In his narrative he states
that it is worn for the whole day. In a town of 16,000 inhabitants—for
Aberdeen had no more at that time[518]—it might be supposed that the
face of the youngest freeman would thus become known to most of his
brother-burgesses. But the population at the present day is seven or
eight times as large, and the old custom has died out, perhaps because
its use was lost. On those rare occasions when the honour is conferred
the diploma is still tied to the hat. The new citizen covers himself
for a moment, and then bares his head while he returns thanks. He
might, I was told, perhaps wear his ticket for a short distance to his
hotel or a club, but certainly not farther. The entry of Johnson’s
freedom in its good Latin still remains in the City Register. I read it
with much interest.
[Sidenote: THE CHAPEL AT ABERDEEN.]
Our travellers, as they passed a Sunday in Aberdeen, went to the
English chapel. The word _chapel_, as my friend Dr. Murray has clearly
pointed out in his learned Dictionary, which in England was generally
used of the places of worship of the Nonconformists, and in Ireland of
those of the Roman Catholics, in Scotland was properly and universally
applied to the English churches. It is the term used both by Boswell
and Johnson. Mrs. Carlyle in one of her early letters describes a
certain Haddington Episcopalian as “a man without an arm, who sits in
the chapel.”[519] “We found,” says Boswell, “a respectable congregation
and an admirable organ.” By _respectable_ he meant what would a little
later have been described as _genteel_. “The congregation,” wrote
Johnson, “was numerous and splendid.” The volunteer who accompanied the
Duke of Cumberland’s army in 1747 described the chapel as the finest
he had seen in Scotland. “The handsomest young ladies,” he adds, “are
generally attendants of those meeting-houses (as they call them here),
and are generally esteemed as Jacobites by the staunch Whigs.”[520]
Wesley, who had attended the service here a year earlier than Johnson,
“could not but admire the exemplary decency of the congregation. This
was the more remarkable,” he adds, “because so miserable a reader I
never heard before. Listening with all attention I understood but one
single word, _Balak_, in the First Lesson, and one more, _begat_, was
all I could possibly distinguish in the Second.”[521] The Aberdeen
chapel was no doubt one of those licensed ones “served by clergymen
of English or Irish ordination,” where alone in Scotland the form of
worship of the Church of England could be legally practised. [Sidenote:
THE NONJURING CLERGY] At St. Andrews Boswell recorded that he had seen
“in one of its streets a remarkable proof of liberal toleration; a
nonjuring clergyman strutting about in his canonicals, with a jolly
countenance, and a round belly, like a well-fed monk.” By an Act of
Parliament passed in 1747, a heavy and cruel blow had been struck at
the Scotch nonjurors as a punishment for the support which many of them
had given to the young Pretender. Under severe penalties all clergymen
were forbidden to officiate who had received their ordination from a
nonjuring bishop, even though they took the oaths. They had now to
undergo some of the suffering which in their day of triumph they had
inflicted on the Covenanters. They in their turn sought the shelter
of woods and moors. We read of one of them at Muthill, in Perthshire,
“baptising a child under the cover of the trees in one of Lord Rollo’s
parks to prevent being discovered.”[522] Two years later one Mr. John
Skinner had been sent to Aberdeen jail for six months for officiating
contrary to law. He survived this persecution fifty-five years, and so
was contemporary with persons still living.[523] By another act all
episcopal clergymen were required, whenever they celebrated worship
before five people, to pray for the King and the members of the Royal
Family by name, under the penalty of six months’ imprisonment for the
first offence, and of banishment to America for life for the second.
Many under this act were thrown into jail, and so late as 1755 one
unhappy man was banished for life.[524] Others complied with the law
at the expense of their lungs. An English lady who visited Scotland
about the year 1778, says: “I have heard a reverend old divine say
that he has read the English liturgy so repeatedly over to only
four that frequently by evening he has scarce been able to speak to
be heard.”[525] The persecutions had come to an end by the time of
Johnson’s visit. The nonjuring ministers were, he says, “by tacit
connivance quietly permitted in separate congregations.” On the death
of the young Pretender on January 31st, 1788, the nonjuring bishops
met at Aberdeen and directed that, beginning with Sunday, May 25th,
King George should be prayed for by name. His Majesty was graciously
pleased to notify his approbation.[526] Even a tutor or “pedagogue” in
a gentleman’s family was required to take the oaths. This difficulty,
however, was easily surmounted. They could be engaged “under the name
of factor, or clerk, or comrade,” as the Bishop of Moray pointed out in
a letter written in 1754.[527]
[Sidenote: THE UNIVERSITIES OF ABERDEEN.]
In Aberdeen there were two Colleges, or rather two Universities, for
each had professors of the same parts of learning and each conferred
degrees. In 1860 they were incorporated into one body. [Sidenote:
KING’S COLLEGE.] In old Aberdeen stood King’s College. The Chapel
and its “Crowned Tower,” founded by James IV. who fell at Flodden,
has survived time and restorers. They are much as Johnson saw them.
Of their architectural beauty and of the ancient richly carved oak
screen he makes no mention: “He had not come to Scotland,” he said,
“to see fine places, of which there were enough in England; but wild
objects—peculiar manners; in short, things which he had not seen
before.” The discipline of the Universities and the method and cost
of instruction he examined with attention. In Scotch universities the
students generally lived—as they live at present—in lodgings in the
town, scarcely under even the pretence of control except in the hours
in which they attended lectures. But in King’s College a few years
earlier the English system had been introduced. Dr. Thomas Reid, the
famous Professor of Moral Philosophy, in a letter written in 1755 gives
an interesting account of the change which had been made:
“The students have lately been compelled to live within the
college. We need but look out at our windows to see when they
rise and when they go to bed. They are seen nine or ten times
throughout the day statedly by one or other of the masters—at
public prayers, school hours, meals, and in their rooms,
besides occasional visits which we can make with little
trouble to ourselves. They are shut up within walls at nine
at night. This discipline hath indeed taken some pains and
resolution, as well as some expense to establish it. The board
at the first table is 50 merks[528] per quarter; at the second,
40 shillings. The rent of a room is from seven to twenty
shillings in the session. There is no furniture in their rooms
but bedstead, tables, chimney grate and fender—the rest they
must buy or hire. They provide fire, and candle, and washing to
themselves. The other dues are two guineas to the Master; to
the Professors of Greek and Humanity [Latin] for their public
teaching, five shillings each. All other perquisites not named,
from twelve shillings to seventeen and sixpence.”[529]
[Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE, ABERDEEN.]
[Sidenote: ENGLISH STUDENTS.]
Whether this reformed system lasted in its full extent to the time of
Johnson’s visit, I do not know; some part of it at all events remained.
“In the King’s College,” he says, “there is kept a public table, but
the scholars of the Marischal College are boarded in the town.” In
Aberdeen, as well as in the other Scotch Universities, students from
England were commonly found. Johnson was surprised at finding in
King’s College a great-grandson of Waller the poet. But in the state
of degradation into which the English Universities were sunk, what
was more natural than that young Englishmen should be sent to places
where the Professors still remembered that they had a duty to perform
as well as a salary to receive? I have seen in the Royal Society of
Edinburgh a manuscript letter written by Dr. Blair from that town
to David Hume in 1765, in which he says:—“Our education here is at
present in high reputation. The Englishes are crowding down upon us
every season, and I wish may not come to hurt us at last.” Excellent
though the Aberdeen Professors were as teachers, yet before the great
Englishman they seemed afraid to speak. Johnson, writing to Mrs.
Thrale, said:—“Boswell was very angry that they would not talk.”
[Illustration: MARISCHAL COLLEGE.]
[Sidenote: REYNOLDS’S PORTRAIT OF BEATTIE.]
In Marischal College scarcely a fragment remains of the old building
which our travellers saw, except the stone with the curious
inscription:—“Thay haif said; quhat say thay; lat thame say.” In the
spacious modern library is shown, however, a famous picture which
Reynolds was at that time painting. On that very morning when Robertson
was showing Johnson Holyrood Palace, Reynolds began the allegorical
picture in which he represented Truth and the amiable and harmonious
Beattie triumphing together over scepticism and infidelity.[530] It
was commonly said that in the group of discomfited figures could be
recognized the portraits of Voltaire and Hume. Goldsmith, if we may
trust Northcote, reproached Reynolds “for wishing to degrade so high
a genius as Voltaire before so mean a writer as Dr. Beattie.”[531]
If Voltaire’s face is to be found in the picture, the likeness is so
remote that even he, sensitive though he was, could scarcely have take
offence, while of Hume not even the caricature can be discovered.
Feeble though the allegory is, the portrait of Beattie is a very fine
piece of workmanship. In Marischal College, by the generosity of his
grand-nieces it has found its fitting resting-place, for here for many
years he was Professor of Moral Philosophy. Here a few years earlier he
had been visited by Gray, who, to quote Johnson’s words, “found him a
poet, a philosopher, and a good man.”[532]
[Illustration: ELLON.]