The Duke of Argyle, who had heard Dr. Johnson complain that the
shelties were too small for his weight, “was obliging enough to mount
him on a stately steed from his Grace’s stable.” Joseph (Boswell’s
servant), said:—“He now looks like a bishop.” Leaving Inverary on the
morning of Tuesday, October 26, they rode round the head of Loch Fyne
through Glencroe to Tarbet on Loch Lomond. Boswell, who was becoming
somewhat indolent in keeping his journal, passes over this part of
their tour in silence. Saint-Fond speaks of the Glen as “ce triste
passage.” Pennant describes it as “the seat of melancholy,” and Johnson
as “a black and dreary region. At the top of the hill,” he adds, “is
a seat with this inscription, ‘Rest and be thankful.’ Stones were
placed to mark the distances, which the inhabitants have taken away,
resolved, they said, to have no new miles.” The road was that at which
Wolfe’s men had been working twenty years earlier.
[Illustration: “REST AND BE THANKFUL.”]
[Sidenote: “REST AND BE THANKFUL.”]
“He that has gained at length the wished for height,” still finds as
Wordsworth many years later found “this brief, this simple wayside
call,” _Rest and be Thankful_; but there is no longer a seat where his
weary limbs may repose. Perhaps some day it will be restored with the
old inscription and the following addition:—“James Wolfe, 1753. Samuel
Johnson, 1773. William Wordsworth, 1831.” It is on a mile-stone, or on
what looks like a mile-stone, that the inscription is now read. Beneath
is carved.
MILITARY ROAD REPD.
BY 93D REGT. 1768.
TRANSFERRED TO
COMMRS FOR H. R. & B.[726]
IN THE YEAR 1814.
One of the earlier tablets, which were believed to have been put up by
Wolfe’s men, was pulled down many years ago by a farmer at Ardvoirlich,
and transformed into a hearth stone.[727] Glencroe is but little
changed since Johnson looked upon it. It is still lonely and grand.
The tourist’s carriage breaks the quiet from time to time, but it soon
sinks back into “sublimity, silence and solitude.” When we passed
through it there was no succession of cataracts and no roaring torrent
such as Johnson described. The long drought had made a silence in the
hills. We met only one tourist—a lad on his bicycle who had escaped
that morning from the smoke of Glasgow, and full of eagerness and life,
was pressing on to the inn where his long ride of fifty miles would
find its pleasant termination in dinner and a bed. I called to mind how
seven and thirty years before when I was just such another youngster,
as I was crossing the top of the Glen, I had seen in the distance
something white fluttering in the wind. It was a big Highlander
returning, as he told us, from Glasgow. Overcome by the heat of the
day, and incommoded by a garment to which he was not much accustomed,
he had taken off his trousers and was carrying them on his shoulders.
It was his shirt that had caught my eye.
[Illustration: MILESTONES ON THE TARBET ROAD.]
[Sidenote: A JUDGE ON CIRCUIT.]
At Tarbet our travellers dined at the little inn on the bank of Loch
Lomond. Here, a few years later, Saint-Fond and his party arrived very
late on a rainy night in September. They were on their way from Glasgow
to Inverary, and had meant to rest at Luss. Unfortunately for them it
was the time of the autumn circuit. The inn looked like a fisherman’s
hut. The landlady coming out made them a sign that they must not utter
a sound. They were thrust into a stable, where she said:—“Le lord juge
me fait l’honorable faveur dans sa tournée de loger chez moi; il est
là; chacun doit respecter ce qu’il fait; il dort.” She added that she
could take in neither them nor their horses. They remonstrated, “Point
de bruit, ne troublez pas le sommeil du juge, respect à la loi; soyez
heureux et partez.” They had no help for it, but drove on with their
weary horses through the night and the heavy rain to Tarbet, where
they arrived between three and four next morning. There they found all
the beds occupied by jurymen, who were on their way to Inverary. The
landlady did what she could to make them comfortable, and gave them
some good tea in a set of China cups which had been given her by the
Duchess of Argyle.[728]
[Illustration: ROSEDEW.]
[Sidenote: LORD JEFFREY AT TARBET.]
At Stuckgown, close to Tarbet, Lord Jeffrey for many years passed a
few weeks of every summer, in a quietness and solitude which have for
ever fled the place. Writing from Tarbet on August 5, 1818, he says:
“Here we are in a little inn on the banks of Loch Lomond, in the midst
of the mists of the mountains, the lakes, heaths, rocks, and cascades
which have been my passion since I was a boy, and to which, like a
boy, I have run away the instant I could get my hands clear of law,
and review, and Edinburgh. They have no post-horses in the Highlands,
and we sent away those that brought us here, with orders to come back
for us to morrow, and so we are left without a servant, entirely at
the mercy of the natives.” He goes on to mention a steam-boat “which
circumnavigates the whole lake every day in about ten hours. It was
certainly very strange and striking to hear and see it hissing and
roaring past the headlands of our little bay, foaming and spouting
like an angry whale; but on the whole it rather vulgarises the scene
too much, and I am glad that it is found not to answer, and is to be
dropped next year.”[729] At Tarbet the tourist who is oppressed with
the size of the hotel and the army of waiters, and who sees the pier
as I saw it crowned with an automatic sweetmeat machine, may well
wish that the steam-boat had never been found to answer. The scene
is hopelessly vulgarised. It is fast sinking into the paradise of
cockneys. I asked for that variety of bread which I remember to have
seen served up there thirty-seven years ago. I was scornfully told that
in those days the Scotch had not known how to bake, but that now they
could make a large loaf as well as anyone. At Inverary I had in vain
asked for oat-cakes at my hotel. If Johnson were to make his journey in
these present times, and were confined to the big tourists’ hotels, he
would certainly no longer say that an epicure, wherever he had supped,
would wish to breakfast in Scotland.
[Illustration: INCH GALBRAITH.]
[Sidenote: THE COLQUHOUNS OF ROSEDEW.]
From Tarbet he rode along the shores of Loch Lomond to Rosedew,[730]
the house of Sir James Colquhoun. “It was a place,” says the historian
of Dumbartonshire, “rich in historic associations, but about 1770 it
was superseded by a new mansion, to which large additions have since
been made.”[731] Here Boswell passed in review Johnson’s courteous
behaviour at Inverary, and said, “‘You were quite a fine gentleman when
with the duchess.’ He answered in good humour, ‘Sir, I look upon myself
as a very polite man.’” Next morning “we took,” writes Johnson, “a boat
to rove upon the lake. It has about thirty islands, of which twenty
belong to Sir James. Young Colquhoun[732] went into the boat with us,
but a little agitation of the water frighted him to shore. We passed
up and down and landed upon one small island,[733] on which are the
ruins of a castle; and upon another much larger, which serves Sir James
for a park, and is remarkable for a large wood of yew trees.” Just one
hundred years later, on December 18, 1873, that very fate befell one of
his descendants which the young Colquhoun dreaded for himself. In the
darkness of a winter’s evening his boat was upset as he was coming home
from the Yew Island, and he was drowned with three of his gamekeepers
and a boy. It was never known how the accident happened, for no one
escaped; but the boat was heavily laden with the dead bodies of some
stags, which they had shot in the island, and the unhappy men were
weighed down with their accoutrements and the ammunition which they
carried. The yew trees were planted, it was said, on the advice of King
Robert Bruce, in order to furnish the Lennox men with trusty bows.[734]
The old castle, “on which the osprey built her annual nest,” is so much
buried in ivy that it is not easily distinguished from the surrounding
woods. [Sidenote: ROVING ON LOCH LOMOND.] We hired a boat at Luss and
in our turn roved upon the lake. We landed on one of the islands and
lunched on the top of a rock by the ruins of a second castle. Loch
Lomond, studded with islands, lay like a mirror beneath us, with the
huge Ben Lomond for a noble background. From time to time a boat broke
the smoothness of the water, and the cry of a gull, or the bark of a
far-away dog, the stillness of the air. We spoke of the heat and bustle
of the world, but imagination almost refused to picture them in so
peaceful a spot. Our boatman was a man of a strong mind, which had not
been suffered to lie barren. He bore his part well in a talk on books.
I had chanced to mention the serfs who worked in the coal-mines and
salt-pans in Scotland; he at once struck into the conversation. “Sir
Walter Scott,” he said, “makes one of his characters say, ‘he would not
take him back like a collier on a salter.’ This made me look the matter
up for I did not understand what he meant.” [Sidenote: OLD AND
NEW DOMINIES.] He praised the old Scotch common schools. “We
Scotchmen,” he proudly said, “have had education for three hundred
years. A Scotch working-man would starve to death to give his son
a good education.” The present race of schoolmasters who are “paid
by results,” he contrasted unfavourably with those whom he had
known in his boyhood. “The old Dominies would willingly teach all
that they knew, and grudged no time to a boy who was eager for
knowledge; but now they are like other people, and when they have
done their day’s work they will do no more.” In the village club
to which he belonged, they had in the last two or three winters
engaged for a few weeks a young Glasgow student to teach them
elocution, “for how could they enjoy Shakespeare if they did not
know how to read him properly?” He praised the Colquhouns. “They
would never send any of their tenants to prison for poaching. They
might fine them, but the money they would give away in charity.” He
spoke of the old clan feeling, and of the protection given by the
laird. His grandfather, who was a farmer, a Macpherson by name, had
married a Macqueen.[735] On a rapid fall in the price of Highland
cattle he fell into money difficulties, and was harshly threatened
with a forced sale by one of his creditors. The Laird of the
Macqueens said significantly to this man: “You may do whatever you
like against Macpherson, but remember that his wife is a Macqueen.”
The hint was enough, and the proceedings were at once dropped. Our
boatman had read Johnson’s _Journey to the Western Islands_, but
said that Scotchmen feel too sore about him to like reading him.
I opened the book, for I had it with me, and read the concluding
words in which he says: “Novelty and ignorance must always be
reciprocal, and I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on
national manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little.”
My boatman was much struck with his modesty, and seemed to think
that he had formed too severe a judgment.
[Illustration: YEW TREE ISLAND.]
Boswell was not so careful in recording Johnson’s talk on the Lake
as I was with our boatman’s. “I recollect,” he writes, “none of his
conversation, except that, when talking of dress, he said, ‘Sir, were
I to have any thing fine, it should be very fine. Were I to wear a
ring, it should not be a bauble, but a stone of great value. Were I to
wear a laced or embroidered waistcoat, it should be very rich. I had
once a very rich laced waistcoat, which I wore the first night of my
tragedy.’” Johnson, nearly five and twenty years before, sat in one of
the side-boxes of Drury Lane Theatre, in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich
gold lace, and a gold-laced hat, listening to the catcalls whistling
before the curtain rose; how little could he have thought that one day
he would boast of his costume as he was roving in a boat upon Loch
Lomond!
[Illustration: CAMERON.]
[Sidenote: COMMISSARY SMOLLETT.]
In the evening they drove to Cameron, the seat of Commissary Smollett.
It was the first drive which they had taken since at Inverness they
began their _equitation_ full two months earlier. “Our satisfaction,”
says Boswell, “of [_sic_] finding ourselves again in a comfortable
carriage was very great. We had a pleasing conviction of the
commodiousness of civilisation, and heartily laughed at the ravings
of those absurd visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the
superior advantages of a _state of nature_.” With these visionaries
Boswell himself sometimes sided. The people of Otaheite especially
had won his admiration. “No, Sir;” said Johnson to him on one such
occasion: “You are not to talk such paradox; let me have no more
on’t. It cannot entertain, far less can it instruct.” “Don’t cant in
defence of savages,” he said, on another occasion. At Cameron they
had none of this fanciful talk. Their host “was a man of considerable
learning, with abundance of animal spirits; so that he was a very good
companion for Dr. Johnson, who said, ‘We have had more solid talk
here than at any place where we have been.’” He was a relation of the
great novelist, and one of the four judges of the Commissary Court in
Edinburgh. It was the sole court in Scotland which took cognisance
of actions about marriage, and the Supreme Court in all questions of
probate. “It sat,” says the lively Topham, “in a little room of about
ten feet square; from the darkness and dirtiness of it you would rather
imagine that those who were brought into it were confined there.” The
judges were paid rather by perquisites than by salaries. In each cause
they fixed the amount which the litigants should pay them for the
sentence which they pronounced.[736]
[Illustration: SMOLLETT’S PILLAR.]
[Sidenote: TOBIAS SMOLLETT.]
Smollett, in his _Humphry Clinker_, brings Matthew Bramble and his
nephew to Cameron, who describe it as “a very neat country house,
but so embosomed in an oak wood that we did not see it till we were
within fifty yards of the door.” “If I was disposed to be critical,”
Mr. Bramble continues, “I should say it is too near the Lake,
which approaches on one side to within six or seven yards of the
window.”[737] The Commissary had erected a pillar by the side of the
high road to Glasgow, “to the memory of his ingenious kinsman,” who
two years earlier had died in Italy, “Eheu! quam procul a patria!” The
Latin inscription for this monument was shown to Johnson, and revised
by him “with an ardent and liberal earnestness.” The copy with the
corrections in his handwriting is preserved among the family papers at
Cameron.[738]
[Illustration: DUNBARTON.]
On Thursday, October 28, a postchaise which Boswell had ordered from
Glasgow, “came for us,” he says, “and we drove on in high spirits.”
On their way they stopped at Dunbarton, then “a small but good old
town, consisting principally of one large street in the form of
a crescent;”[739] but now a smoky seat of the iron ship-building
industry. The steep rock on which the Castle stands Johnson “ascended
with alacrity.” [Sidenote: THE “SARACEN’S HEAD,” GLASGOW.] At Glasgow
they stayed at the “Saracen’s Head,” “the paragon of inns in the eyes
of the Scotch,” says a writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, “but
most wretchedly managed.”[740] Our two travellers seem to have been
contented. Johnson, no doubt, was kept in the best of humours by the
sight of a great many letters from England, after the long interval of
sixty-eight days during which not a line had reached him. “He enjoyed
in imagination the comforts which we could now command, and seemed
to be in high glee. I remember, he put a leg up on each side of the
grate, and said, with a mock solemnity, by way of soliloquy, but loud
enough for me to hear it: ‘Here am I, an ENGLISH man, sitting by a
_coal_ fire.’” Of fires made by peat, that “sullen fuel,” he had had
enough in the last two months. All along the sea-board coal was made
artificially dear by the folly of Parliament. A duty of five shillings
and fourpence per chaldron, says Knox, was levied on coal at ports;
none on inland coal. It had to be landed at a port where there is a
custom-house, and might then be re-shipped for some other place in the
neighbourhood.[741] Custom-houses were few and far between, so that
in many cases, if coal was used at all, it would have had to be twice
landed and twice shipped. On this mischievous regulation Adam Smith
remarks: “Where coals are naturally cheap they are consumed duty free;
where they are naturally dear, they are loaded with a heavy duty.”[742]
The “Saracen’s Head” with its coal fire has disappeared. My boatman
had heard the old people talk of it. In this inn the following morning
Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two of the other professors of the
University breakfasted with Johnson. He met some of them also at
dinner, tea, and supper. “I was not much pleased with any of them,”
he wrote to Mrs. Thrale. Boswell unfortunately was again lazy with
his journal, and kept no record of the talk. [Sidenote: THE GLASGOW
PROFESSORS.] Writing long afterwards, he says: “The general impression
upon my memory is, that we had not much conversation at Glasgow, where
the professors, like their brethren at Aberdeen, did not venture to
expose themselves much to the battery of cannon which they knew might
play upon them.” Reid’s silence was perhaps merely due to that reserve
which he generally shewed among strangers.[743] Had fate been kinder,
the great Clow might have been still among them, who twenty-two years
before had been preferred both to Hume and Burke as Adam Smith’s
successor in the Chair of Logic.[744] The story of the Billingsgate
altercation between Smith and Johnson, recorded by Sir Walter Scott,
is wholly untrue. Smith was not at this time in Glasgow. It is, no
doubt, one of those tales about Johnson in which Scotch invention was
humorously displayed. It was, perhaps, meant as a reply to the question
which one day, in London, he put to Adam Smith, who was boasting of
Glasgow, “Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?” Boswell says: “I
put him in mind of it to-day while he expressed his admiration of the
elegant buildings, and whispered him, ‘Don’t you feel some remorse?’”
Smith’s pride in the city where he had spent more than three years as a
student, and twelve as a professor, was assuredly well-founded. Johnson
calls it “opulent and handsome,” and Boswell “beautiful.” [Sidenote:
GLASGOW IN DAYS OF OLD.] Nearly two centuries earlier Camden had said
that “for pleasant situation, apple-trees, and other like fruit-trees,
it is much commended.”[745] Defoe describes it as “indeed a very fine
city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the
finest built that I have ever seen in one city together. It is the
cleanest, and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London
excepted.”[746] Another traveller of about the same date says that “it
is the beautifullest little city he had seen in Britain. It stands
deliciously on the banks of the River Clyde.”[747] In June, 1757,
John Wesley went up to the top of the cathedral steeple. “It gave
us a fine prospect,” he writes, “both of the city and the adjacent
country. A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be
seen in England.”[748] Smollett swells the general chorus of praise:
“Glasgow is the pride of Scotland. It is one of the prettiest towns in
Europe.”[749] Pennant, who visited it the year before Johnson, calls it
“the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw. The view from the
Cross has an air of vast magnificence.”[750]
At the Rebellion of 1745 the citizens had shown the greatest loyalty.
They raised and supported at their own expense two battalions of six
hundred men each, who joined the duke’s army. Their town was occupied
by the Pretender’s forces, who for ten days lived there at free
quarters. They had had to pay, moreover, two heavy fines, amounting to
more than nine thousand pounds, imposed on them for their fidelity to
the Hanoverian Family. In 1749, in answer to their petition for relief,
they received a grant from Parliament of ten thousand pounds.[751] On
April 24 of that same year a stage-coach began to run between Glasgow
and Edinburgh, starting from Edinburgh every Monday and Thursday,
and from Glasgow every Tuesday and Friday. “Every person pays nine
shillings fare, and is allowed a stone-weight of luggage.”[752] By
the year 1783 far greater facilities were afforded. In John Tait’s
_Directory for Glasgow_ of that year (p. 77) it is announced that
“three machines set out from each town every day at eight morning.
They stop on the road and change horses. Tickets, 10_s._ 6_d._ each.”
There was another daily “machine” belonging to a different set of
proprietors, besides one which ran only three times a week, and charged
but 8_s._ 6_d._ “The Carlisle Diligence,” it is announced, “sets out
every lawful day.”
As we gaze on the filthy river which runs by the large city, on the
dense cloud of smoke which hangs over it, on the grimy streets which
have swallowed up the country far and wide, while we exult in the
display of man’s ingenuity and strength, and in the commerce by which
the good things of earth are so swiftly and cheaply interchanged, we
may mourn over the beautiful little town among the apple-trees which
stood so deliciously on the banks of the fair and pure stream that ran
to seawards beneath the arches of the old stone bridge. How far removed
from us are those days when Glasgow was pillaged by the wild rabble of
Highlanders! Yet I have an uncle[753] still living who remembers his
grandfather and his grandfather’s brother, one of whom had climbed up
a tree to see the other march with a body of Worcestershire volunteers
against the Young Pretender.
Johnson, after seeing the sights of the city, visited the college.
“It has not had,” he writes, “a sufficient share of the increasing
magnificence of the place.” From the account which Dr. Alexander
Carlyle gives of the citizens, as he had known them about thirty years
earlier, they were not likely to trouble themselves much about the
glory of their University. With a few exceptions they were “shopkeepers
and mechanics, or successful pedlars, who occupied large warerooms full
of manufactures of all sorts to furnish a cargo to Virginia. In those
accomplishments and that taste that belong to people of opulence, much
more to persons of education, they were far behind the citizens of
Edinburgh.” There was not a teacher of French or of music in the whole
town. [Sidenote: GLASGOW UNIVERSITY.] Nevertheless, in the University
itself he found “learning an object of more importance, and the habit
of application much more general” than in the rival institution in the
capital.[754] Wesley compared the two squares which formed the college
with the small quadrangles of Lincoln College, Oxford, of which he
was a Fellow, and did not think them larger, or at all handsomer. He
was surprised at the dress of the students. “They wear scarlet gowns,
reaching only to their knees. Most I saw were very dirty, some very
ragged, and all of very coarse cloth.”[755] How much more surprised
would he have been at the far shorter gowns now worn by the commoners
in his own university, showing, as they do, a raggedness which is not
the effect of age and wear, but of intentional mutilation! There is
an affectation of antiquity quite as much in a freshman’s gown, as in
the pedigree of some upstart who boasts that he is sprung from the
Plantagenets. The college numbered at this time about four hundred
students, most of whom lived in lodgings, but some boarded with the
professors.[756]
[Sidenote: PRINCIPAL LEECHMAN.]
The principal was Dr. Leechman, whose sermon on prayer had once raised
a storm “among the high-flying clergy.”[757]
“In his house Dr. Johnson had the satisfaction of being told
that his name had been gratefully celebrated in one of the
parochial congregations in the Highlands, as the person to
whose influence it was chiefly owing that the New Testament was
allowed to be translated into the Erse language. It seems some
political members of the Society in Scotland for propagating
Christian Knowledge had opposed this pious undertaking, as
tending to preserve the distinction between the Highlanders and
Lowlanders.”
Johnson, in a letter full of generous indignation, had maintained that
“he that voluntarily continues ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes
which ignorance produces,” and had compared these political Christians
to the planters of America, “a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no
other man wishes to resemble.”[758] Though he was no doubt struck
by Leechman’s appearance, “which was that of an ascetic, reduced by
fasting and prayer,” yet in his talk he could have had no pleasure.
“He was not able to carry on common conversation, and when he spoke
at all, it was a short lecture.” The young students who were invited
to his house, longed to be summoned from the library to tea in the
drawing-room, where his wife “maintained a continued conversation on
plays, novels, poetry, and the fashions.”[759]
[Illustration: DUNDONALD CASTLE.]