[Sidenote: LORD AUCHINLECK.]
On Tuesday, November 2, our travellers having ordered a chaise from
Kilmarnock, drove to Auchinleck, where they arrived in time for dinner.
“We purpose,” wrote Johnson that same evening, “to stay here some days,
more or fewer, as we are used.” He said “we” advisedly, for he knew
that not only between Lord Auchinleck and himself there was little in
common, but that also between the father and son there was no freedom
of intercourse. “My father,” Boswell once complained, “cannot bear that
his son should talk with him as a man.”[768] How uncomfortable was his
position at home is shown by a letter which he wrote to his friend the
Rev. Mr. Temple in September, 1775:
“I came to Auchinleck on Monday last, and I have patiently
lived at it till Saturday evening.... It is hardly credible
how difficult it is for a man of my sensibility to support
existence in the family where I now am. My father, whom I
really both respect and affectionate (if that is a word, for
it is a different feeling from that which is expressed by
_love_, which I can say of you from my soul), is so different
from me. We _divaricate_ so much, as Dr. Johnson said, that
I am often hurt when, I dare say, he means no harm: and he
has a method of treating me which makes me feel myself like
a _timid boy_, which to _Boswell_ (comprehending all that my
character does in my own imagination and in that of a wonderful
number of mankind) is intolerable. His wife too, whom in my
conscience I cannot condemn for any capital bad quality, is so
narrow-minded, and, I don’t know how, so set upon keeping him
under her own management, and so suspicious and so sourishly
tempered that it requires the utmost exertion of practical
philosophy to keep myself quiet. I however have done so all
this week to admiration: nay, I have appeared good-humoured;
but it has cost me drinking a considerable quantity of strong
beer to dull my faculties.”[769]
It can scarcely be doubted that he is describing the position which he
himself held at home, in an essay which he published in the _London
Magazine_ in 1781 (p. 253):
“I knew a father who was a violent Whig, and used to attack his
son for being a Tory, upbraiding him with being deficient in
‘noble sentiments of liberty,’ while at the same time he made
this son live under his roof in such bondage, that he was not
only afraid to stir from home without leave, like a child, but
durst scarcely open his mouth in his father’s presence. This
was sad living. Yet I would rather see such an excess of awe
than a degree of familiarity between father and son by which
all reverence is destroyed.”
[Illustration: AUCHINLECK.]
Lord Auchinleck had taken unto himself a second wife on the very day
of his son’s marriage. She was, in all likelihood, in the house at the
time of Johnson’s visit, but neither by him nor Boswell is she once
mentioned. She remained, no doubt, silent and insignificant. With their
reception they must have been satisfied on the whole, as they prolonged
their stay till the sixth day, in spite of the famous altercation which
Boswell’s piety forbade him to record at any length. That only one such
scene should have occurred speaks well for the self-control both of
host and guest. To Boswell Johnson had quickly become attached. “Give
me your hand,” he said to him in the first weeks of their acquaintance,
“I have taken a liking to you.” A month or so later he added, “There
are few people to whom I take so much as to you.” But Lord Auchinleck,
though he might have respected he never could have liked. No men were
more unlike in everything but personal appearance, than Boswell and his
father. The old man had none of that “facility of manners,” of which,
according to Adam Smith, the son “was happily possessed.”[770] Whence
he got it we are nowhere told—perhaps from his mother. It certainly
was not from his paternal grandfather, the old advocate, “who was a
slow, dull man of unwearied perseverance and unmeasurable length in
his speeches. It was alleged he never understood a cause till he had
lost it thrice.”[771] [Sidenote: BOSWELL’S DUTCH BLOOD.] There were
those who attributed Boswell’s eccentricities to his great grandmother,
Veronica, Countess of Kincardine, a Dutch lady of the noble house of
Sommelsdyck. “For this marriage,” writes Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “their
posterity paid dear, for most of them had peculiarities which they had
better have wanted.” He adds that “Boswell’s behaviour on the occasion
of the riots in Edinburgh about the Douglas cause, savoured so much of
insanity, that it was generally imputed to his Dutch blood.”[772] Why
madness was supposed to come from Holland I do not know. Sir William
Temple, writing of that country, says: “In general all appetites and
passions seem to run lower and cooler here than in other countries
where I have conversed. Their tempers are not airy enough for joy or
any unusual strains of pleasant humour, nor warm enough for love. This
is talked of sometimes among the younger men, but as a thing they have
heard of rather than felt; and as a discourse that becomes them rather
than affects them.”[773] All this was the very reverse of Boswell’s
eager and wild youth, though perhaps not unlike the character of his
father and grandfather. [Sidenote: AUCHINLECK LIBRARY.] There was one
thing in common between Johnson and the old judge, both were sound
scholars. At Auchinleck there was a library “which,” says Boswell,
“incurious editions of the Greek and Roman classics is, I suppose, not
excelled by any private collection in Great Britain.”
Here Johnson found an edition of Anacreon which he had long sought in
vain. “They had therefore much matter for conversation without touching
on the fatal topics of difference.” In all questions of Church and
State they were wide as the poles asunder. In the perfect confidence
which each man had in his own judgment there was nothing to choose
between them.
[Sidenote: LORD AUCHINLECK.]
“My father,” writes Boswell, “was as sanguine a Whig and
Presbyterian as Dr. Johnson was a Tory and Church-of-England
man: and as he had not much leisure to be informed of Dr.
Johnson’s great merits by reading his works, he had a partial
and unfavourable notion of him, founded on his supposed
political tenets; which were so discordant to his own, that
instead of speaking of him with that respect to which he was
entitled, he used to call him ‘_a Jacobite fellow_.’ Knowing
all this, I should not have ventured to bring them together,
had not my father, out of kindness to me, desired me to invite
Dr. Johnson to his house. I was very anxious that all should
be well; and begged of my friend to avoid three topics, as to
which they differed very widely; Whiggism, Presbyterianism,
and—Sir John Pringle. He said courteously, ‘I shall certainly
not talk on subjects which I am told are disagreeable to a
gentleman under whose roof I am; especially, I shall not do so
to _your father_.’”
Yet with all Lord Auchinleck’s gravity and contempt of his son’s
flightiness, he had known what it was not only to be young, but to be
foolish. Like so many of the young Scotchmen of old, he had been sent
to Holland to study civil law. Thence he had made his way to Paris,
where he had played the fop. Years afterwards one of the companions
of his youth, meeting his son at Lord Kames’s table, “told him that
he had seen his father strutting abroad in red-heeled shoes and red
stockings. The lad was so much diverted with it that he could hardly
sit on his chair for laughing.”[774] His appointment as judge he owed
to that most corrupt of Whig ministers, the Duke of Newcastle,[775]
and he was as Whiggish as his patron. King William III., “one of the
most worthless scoundrels that ever existed,” according to Johnson,
was to him the greatest hero in modern times. Presbyterianism he loved
all the more because it was a cheap religion, and narrowed the power
of the clergy. He laid it down as a rule that a poor clergy was ever a
pure clergy. He added that in former times they had timber communion
cups and silver ministers, but now we were getting silver cups and
timber ministers.[776] According to Sir Walter Scott he carried “his
Whiggery and Presbyterianism to such a height, that once, when a
countryman came in to state some justice business, and being required
to make his oath, declined to do so before his lordship, because he
was not a _covenanted_ magistrate—‘Is that a’ your objection, mon?’
said the judge: ‘come your ways in here, and we’ll baith of us tak the
solemn league and covenant together.’ The oath was accordingly agreed
and sworn to by both, and I dare say it was the last time it ever
received such homage.”[777] He would have nothing to do with clearing
his tongue of Scotticisms, or with smoothing and rounding his periods
on the model of the English classical authors. “His Scotch was broad
and vulgar.”[778] In one thing at all events he was sure of receiving
Johnson’s warm approval. He was a great planter of trees. “It was,”
he said, “his favourite recreation. In his vacations he used to prune
with his own hands the trees which he himself had planted. Beginning
at five in the morning, he wrought with his knife every spare hour. Of
Auchinleck he was passionately fond.”[779] He was not the man to prefer
Fleet Street to the beauties of Nature. “I perceive some dawnings of
taste for the country,” wrote his son on one of his visits to his
old home. “I will force a taste for rural beauties.”[780] He never
succeeded in the attempt, and though he often boasted of “walking among
the rocks and woods of his ancestors,” it was from a distance that he
most admired them.
Rarely were two men more unlike. The old man had in excess that
foresight which in Boswell was so largely wanting. He had built
himself a new house, which Johnson describes as “very magnificent and
very convenient;” but he had proceeded “so slowly and prudently that
he hardly felt the expense.”[781] Across the front of it he put the
inscription—
“Quod petis hic est,
Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit æquus.”[782]
“It is,” writes Boswell, “characteristic of the founder; but
the _animus æquus_ is, alas! not inheritable, nor the subject
of devise. He always talked to me as if it were in a man’s
own power to attain it; but Dr. Johnson told me that he owned
to him, when they were alone, his persuasion that it was in a
great measure constitutional, or the effect of causes which do
not depend on ourselves, and that Horace boasts too much when
he says, _æquum mi animum ipse parabo_.”
[Sidenote: JAMES BOSWELL.]
He had, too, that sobriety of character in which his son was so
conspicuously wanting. “His age, his office, and his character, had
given him an acknowledged claim to great attention in whatever company
he was, and he could ill brook any diminution of it.” He was by no
means deficient in humour, and in this respect father and son were
alike. “He had a great many good stories, which he told uncommonly
well, and he was remarkable for ‘humour, _incolumi gravitate_,’ as Lord
Monboddo used to characterize it.”
The contrast between his dignity and gravity, and Boswell’s bustling
and most comical liveliness, must have been as amusing as it was
striking. His ignorance of his son’s genius, and the contempt for him
which he did not conceal, heightened the picture. Johnson’s presence
would have greatly added to the interest of the scene, for Boswell must
have constantly wavered between his admiration of his idol and his awe
of his father. A few years later Miss Burney met Boswell at Streatham,
and thus describes him, no doubt with a good deal of exaggeration:
“He spoke the Scotch accent strongly. He had an odd mock
solemnity of manner, that he had acquired imperceptibly from
constantly thinking of and imitating Dr. Johnson. There was
something slouching in his gait and dress, that wore an air,
ridiculously enough, of purporting to personify the same model.
His clothes were always too large for him; his hair or wig was
constantly in a state of negligence; and he never for a moment
sat still or upright upon a chair. When he met with Dr. Johnson
he commonly forbore even answering anything that was said,
or attending to anything that went forward, lest he should
miss the smallest sound from that voice to which he paid such
exclusive homage. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his
ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropt
open to catch every syllable that might be uttered. The Doctor
generally treated him as a schoolboy, whom without the smallest
ceremony he pardoned or rebuked alternately.”[783]
It is probable that this description is heightened by Miss Burney’s
wounded vanity. Boswell had not read her _Evelina_, and when he was
reproached by Johnson with being a Brangton—one of the characters
in the novel—he did not know what was meant. She was as careful in
recording the conversation that was about herself as Boswell was in
recording Johnson’s. Her great hero was herself. The voices to which
she paid her homage were those in which she was praised and flattered.
In another place she describes “the singularity of his comic-serious
face and manner.”[784] He himself has more than once drawn his own
character. He was, he flattered himself, a citizen of the world; one
who in his travels never felt himself from home. In that impudent
_Correspondence_ which he and his friend Andrew Erskine published when
they were still almost lads, he thus describes himself:
“The author of the _Ode to Tragedy_ is a most excellent man;
he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which
he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared
omens of his future greatness. His parts are bright; and his
education has been good. He has travelled in post-chaises miles
without number. He is fond of seeing much of the world. He eats
of every good dish, especially apple-pie. He drinks old hock.
He has a very fine temper. He is somewhat of an humorist, and a
little tinctured with pride. He has a good manly countenance,
and he owns himself to be amorous. He has infinite vivacity,
yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast. He is
rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young
than old. His shoes are neatly made, and he never wears
spectacles.”[785]
We have a later description of him again by his own hand, as he was at
the time of his tour with Johnson.
“Think, then (he says), of a gentleman of ancient blood, the
pride of which was his predominant passion. He was then in
his thirty-third year, and had been about four years happily
married. His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father, a
respectable judge, had pressed him into the profession of the
law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties of
human life. He had thought more than anybody supposed, and had
a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. He had
all Dr. Johnson’s principles, with some degree of relaxation.
He had rather too little, than too much prudence; and, his
imagination being lively, he often said things of which the
effect was very different from the intention. He resembled
sometimes
‘The best good man, with the worst natur’d muse.’”
Johnson celebrated his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness, his
acuteness, his gaiety of conversation, and civility of manners. “He
was,” he said, “the best travelling companion in the world.” According
to Burke, “his good nature was so natural to him that he had no merit
in possessing it. A man might as well assume to himself merit in
possessing an excellent constitution.” Reynolds loved him so well that
“he left him £200 in his will, to be expended, if he thought proper,
in the purchase of a picture at the sale of his paintings, to be kept
for his sake.”[786] In a memoir of him in the _Scots Magazine_ he is
described as “a most pleasant companion, affectionate and friendly;
but, particularly in his latter days, he betrayed a vanity which
seemed to predominate.”[787] Tytler praises “his sprightly fancy
and whimsical eccentricity,” which “agreeably tempered the graver
conversation” of Adam Smith or Hugh Blair at the small and select
parties given by Lord Kames.[788]
[Sidenote: THE COLLISION IN THE LIBRARY.]
He was welcome everywhere but at his own father’s house. Neither was he
the better thought of by the old man on account of the great Englishman
whom he brought with him. Everything however went off smoothly for a
day or two, but the host and his guest at length came in collision over
Lord Auchinleck’s collection of medals. The scene is thus described by
Boswell, who witnessed it:
“Oliver Cromwell’s coin unfortunately introduced Charles the
First and Toryism. They became exceedingly warm and violent,
and I was very much distressed by being present at such an
altercation between two men, both of whom I reverenced; yet I
durst not interfere. It would certainly be very unbecoming in
me to exhibit my honoured father and my respected friend, as
intellectual gladiators, for the entertainment of the public;
and, therefore, I suppress what would, I dare say, make an
interesting scene in this dramatic sketch—this account of the
transit of Johnson over the Caledonian Hemisphere.”
Ramsay of Ochtertyre says, that the year after this famous altercation,
Lord Auchinleck “told him with warmth that the great Dr. Johnson, of
whom he had heard wonders, was just a dominie, and the worst-bred
dominie he had ever seen.”[789] The account which Sir Walter Scott
gives is very dramatic, though no doubt somewhat embellished.
“Old Lord Auchinleck (he writes) was an able lawyer, a good
scholar, after the manner of Scotland, and highly valued his
own advantages as a man of good estate and ancient family;
and, moreover, he was a strict Presbyterian and Whig of the
old Scottish cast. This did not prevent his being a terribly
proud aristocrat; and great was the contempt he entertained and
expressed for his son James, for the nature of his friendships
and the character of the personages of whom he was _engoué_ one
after another. ‘There’s nae hope for Jamie, mon,’ he said to
a friend. ‘Jamie is gaen clean gyte.[790] What do you think,
mon? He’s done wi’ Paoli—he’s off wi’ the land-louping[791]
scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has
pinned himself to now, mon?’ Here the old judge summoned up a
sneer of most sovereign contempt. ‘A _dominie_, mon—an auld
dominie: he keeped a schŭle, and cau’d it an acaadamy.”
[Sidenote: SCOTCH DOMINIES.]
The full force of Lord Auchinleck’s contempt is only seen when
we understand the position of a _dominie_. The character of a
schoolmaster, generally, according to Johnson, was less honourable
in Scotland than in England.[792] But the dominie, or tutor in a
family, was still less esteemed. “He was raised,” writes Sir Walter
Scott, “from a humble class to a society where, whatever his personal
attainments might be, he found himself placed at a humiliating distance
from anything like a footing of equality. His remuneration was scanty
in the extreme, and consisting (as if to fill up the measure of
his dependence) not entirely of a fixed salary, but partly of the
precarious prospect of future preferment in the Church. The Scotch
_dominie_ was assuredly one of the most pitiable of human beings.”[793]
It is a curious and perhaps a somewhat suspicious fact, that a very
few years before Sir Walter supplied Mr. Croker with this amusing
story about the old judge, he had put on record in the pages of the
_Quarterly Review_ the following anecdote: “When the old Scots judge
Lord Auchinleck first heard of Johnson’s coming to visit him at his
rural _castellum_, he held up his hands in astonishment, and cried
out, ‘Our Jeemy’s clean aff the hooks now! would ony body believe it?
he’s bringing down a _dominie_ wi’ him—an auld dominie.’”[794] This
looks like a different version of the same story. Moreover, Boswell
tells us that his father had desired him to invite him to his house.
When Johnson called his school at Lichfield an academy, he does not
seem to have used the term pretentiously, for in his _Dictionary_ he
defines the word under one of its meanings as “a place of education in
contradistinction to the universities or public schools.” It does not
seem likely, moreover, that Lord Auchinleck had any feeling of contempt
for Pascal Paoli, a man of good family, who for years had headed a
rebellion against the tyranny first of Genoa and afterwards of France.
He had visited Auchinleck two years before Johnson, and had been well
received. Boswell, writing to Garrick on September 18, 1771, said: “I
have just been enjoying the very great happiness of a visit from my
illustrious friend, Pascal Paoli. He was two nights at Auchinleck,
and you may figure the joy of my worthy father and me at seeing the
Corsican hero in our romantic groves. Count Burgynski, the Polish
ambassador, accompanied him.”[795] Poland’s days of sending ambassadors
had nearly drawn to an end, for the first partition of the country was
made in the following year. It was a strange chance which brought the
last Corsican patriot and the last Polish ambassador to this Ayrshire
mansion. One thing only was wanting. Would that Burns that day had
played truant and had wandered up “Lugar’s winding stream” as far as
Auchinleck! It would, indeed, have formed an interesting group—the
stiff old Scotch judge and his famous son, the great Corsican patriot
and the Pole, with the peasant-lad gazing at them with his eyes full
of beauty and wonder. Paoli’s name is well-nigh forgotten now, but
he and his Corsicans deeply stirred the hearts of our forefathers.
Boswell, by a private subscription in Scotland, had sent out to him in
one week £700 worth of ordnance—“a tolerable train of artillery.”[796]
His account of his tour in that island had been widely read. Even his
father “was rather fond of it. ‘James,’ he said, ‘had taken a _tout_
on a new horn.’”[797] Whether Lord Auchinleck abused Paoli “as a
land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican,” or admired him as he admired
other great patriots, the rest of Sir Walter Scott’s account of the
great altercation may be true enough:
[Sidenote: THE “LITH” IN THE NECKS OF KINGS.]
“The controversy between Tory and Covenanter raged with great
fury, and ended in Johnson’s pressing upon the old judge the
question, what good Cromwell, of whom he had said something
derogatory, had ever done to his country; when, after being
much tortured, Lord Auchinleck at last spoke out, ‘God, Doctor!
he gart kings ken that they had a _lith_ in their neck’—he
taught kings they had a _joint_ in their necks.”
This story did not, I believe, appear in print till the year 1831, when
it was given as a note by Scott in Mr. Croker’s edition of _Boswell_.
Fifty years earlier it had been told in somewhat different words of
Quin the player, who had said that “on a thirtieth of January every
king in Europe would rise with a crick in his neck.” Davies, who
records the anecdote, says that it had been attributed to Voltaire,
but unjustly.[798] It is possible, and even not unlikely, that we have
but a Scotch version of an English saying. Cromwell himself, in his
letter to the governor of Edinburgh Castle, had shown that he too saw
this consequence of his great deed. “The civil authority,” he writes,
“turned out a Tyrant in a way which the Christians in aftertimes
will mention with honour, and all Tyrants in the world look at with
fear.”[799]
In one happy though impudent retort, Lord Auchinleck was very
successful.
[Sidenote: DURHAM ON THE GALATIANS.]
“Dr. Johnson challenged him (writes Boswell) to point out any
theological works of merit written by Presbyterian ministers
in Scotland. My father, whose studies did not lie much in that
way, owned to me afterwards, that he was somewhat at a loss
how to answer, but that luckily he recollected having read
in catalogues the title of _Durham on the Galatians_; upon
which he boldly said, ‘Pray, Sir, have your read Mr. Durham’s
excellent commentary on the Galatians?’ ‘No, Sir,’ said Dr.
Johnson. By this lucky thought my father kept him at bay, and
for some time enjoyed his triumph; but his antagonist soon made
a retort, which I forbear to mention.”
In the long list of Durham’s theological works in the British Museum
catalogue I find no mention of this book on the Galatians. The old
judge, it is clear, had not forgotten in the years which he had sat on
the bench the arts of the advocate. In Rowlandson’s Caricatures there
is a humorous picture of _The Contest at Auchinleck_. Johnson is drawn
felling his opponent with a huge liturgy, having made him drop two
books equally big, entitled _Calvin_ and _Whiggism_. On the floor are
lying the medals over which the dispute had begun, while Boswell is at
the door in an attitude of despair, with his _Journal_ falling from his
hands.
One figure was wanting to make the picture complete. Of the three
topics on which Johnson had been warned not to touch only two had been
introduced. “In the course of their altercation,” writes Boswell,
“Whiggism and Presbyterianism, Toryism and Episcopacy, were terribly
buffeted. My worthy hereditary friend, Sir John Pringle, never having
been mentioned, happily escaped without a bruise.” We could have wished
that he had been mentioned, for though we know of the dislike which
existed between the two men, yet as he has never “hitched” in one of
Johnson’s strong sayings, he has scarcely attained that fame which he
deserved.
Towards Lord Auchinleck Johnson bore no resentment. With him the heat
of altercation soon passed away, but not the memory of the hospitality
which he had received in his house. In not a single word spoken or
written has he attacked him. On the contrary, in his _Journey to the
Western Islands_, he only mentions him to praise him. When, six years
later, he published the first four volumes of his _Lives of the Poets_,
he wrote to Boswell: “Write me word to whom I shall send sets of
_Lives_; would it please Lord Auchinleck?” A few months after this he
wrote to him: “Let me know what reception you have from your father,
and the state of his health. Please him as much as you can, and add no
pain to his last years.” The old lord was not so placable. He had that
“want of tenderness which,” said Johnson, “is want of parts.” This part
of his character is seen in the following anecdote recorded of him by
his son:
“I mentioned to Johnson a respectable person of a very strong
mind, who had little of that tenderness which is common to
human nature; as an instance of which, when I suggested to him
that he should invite his son, who had been settled ten years
in foreign parts, to come home and pay him a visit, his answer
was, ‘No, no, let him mind his business.’ JOHNSON. ‘I do not
agree with him, Sir, in this. Getting money is not all a man’s
business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the
business of life.’”
[Sidenote: LORD AUCHINLECK’S RESENTMENT.]
He had what Boswell calls “the dignified courtesy of an old Baron,”
and when Johnson left “was very civil to him, and politely attended
him to his post-chaise.” But he was not in the least soothed by the
compliments which he paid him in his book. Boswell had hoped that he
might be moved. Writing to Johnson just after it had been published,
he said: “You have done Auchinleck much honour, and have, I hope,
overcome my father, who has never forgiven your warmth for monarchy
and episcopacy. I am anxious to see how your pages will operate upon
him.”[800] His anxious wish was grievously disappointed. A few months
later he wrote to his friend Temple: “My father is most unhappily
dissatisfied with me.... He harps on my going over Scotland with a
brute (think how shockingly erroneous!) and wandering (or some such
phrase) to London. How hard it is that I am totally excluded from
parental comfort! I have a mind to go to Auchinleck next autumn, and
try what living in a mixed stupidity of attention to common objects and
restraint from expressing any of my own feelings can do with him.”[801]
When his father and Johnson were both dead he indulged in the pious
hope that “as they were both worthy Christian men, they had met in
happiness. But I must observe,” he adds, “in justice to my friend’s
political principles and my own, that they have met in a place where
there is no room for _Whiggism_.” Johnson, it is true, “always said the
first Whig was the Devil,” but on the other hand, some Presbyterian who
drew up an epitaph on Lochiel, declared in it that he “is now a Whig in
heaven.”[802]
That pride in his ancient blood, which Boswell boasted was his
predominant passion, was very strong in the old lord. In the son, if it
really existed in any strength, it was happily overpowered by a host
of other and better feelings. He had travelled widely, he had seen a
great variety of men, some of them among the most famous of their age,
and had learnt to value genius without troubling himself about its
pedigree. His successors at Auchinleck had something of the narrowness
of the old judge. [Sidenote: SIR ALEXANDER BOSWELL.] “His eldest son,
Sir Alexander Boswell,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “was a proud man, and
like his grandfather, thought that his father lowered himself by his
deferential suit and service to Johnson. I have observed he disliked
any allusion to the book or to Johnson himself, and I have heard that
Johnson’s fine picture by Sir Joshua was sent upstairs out of the
sitting apartments.”[803] He was not too proud a man to write a poem
on the anniversary of the Accession of George IV., and what is George
IV. now? It was not from any dulness of mind that he did not value his
father’s book. “He had,” says Lockhart, “all _Bozzy’s_ cleverness,
good-humour, and joviality, without one touch of his meaner qualities,
wrote some popular songs, which he sang capitally, and was moreover a
thorough bibliomaniac.”[804] It was due to him and a friend, that the
Burns monument at Ayr was erected. They summoned a public meeting,
but no one attended except themselves. Little daunted they appointed
a chairman, proposed resolutions, carried them unanimously, passed a
vote of thanks, and issued subscription lists. More than £2,000 was
subscribed, and the monument was opened by Sir Alexander shortly before
his death. That he was not wanting in tenderness of heart is shown by
some of his poems. How pretty is the following verse in an address by
an aged father to his children:—
“The auld will speak, the young maun hear,
Be cantie, but be gude and leal;
Your ain ills aye hae heart to bear,
Anither’s aye hae heart to feel.
So, ere I set, I’ll see ye shine;
I’ll see ye triumph ere I fa’;
My parting breath shall boast you mine—
Good night, and joy be wi’ ye a’.”[805]
Lockhart goes, however, too far when he exalts him in comparison with
his father. Boswell, I feel sure, would never have been guilty of
the act which involved his son in the unhappy duel in which he lost
his life. In two scurrilous newspapers he had secretly defamed his
kinsman, Mr. James Stuart, of Dunearn, “with whom he had long been on
good terms.” Though the articles were written in a disguised hand,
the authorship was detected. He received a challenge from the injured
man, and at the first shot fell mortally wounded. He dined with Scott
a day or two before the duel, and “though Charles Matthews (the famous
comedian) was present, poor Sir Alexander Boswell’s songs, jokes, and
anecdotes exhibited no symptom of eclipse.”[806]
[Sidenote: SIR JAMES BOSWELL.]
His only son, Sir James Boswell, the last male descendant of the
author of the immortal _Life_, shared his father’s illiberal feelings
about Johnson. Miss Macleod of Macleod told me that when she was on
a visit at Auchinleck, he said to her one day that he did not know
how he should name one of his race-horses. She suggested Boswell’s
Johnsoniana, which made him very angry. He was, I learnt, a man
of great natural ability, who, had he chosen, might have become
distinguished. His feeling of soreness against his grandfather was
partly due to another cause than dislike of hero-worship. Boswell, in
an access of that particular kind of folly which he called “feudal
enthusiasm,” had entailed his estates on the heirs male of his father
to the exclusion of his own nearer female descendants. Sir James, who
had no sons, saw that Auchinleck on his death would pass away from his
daughters to his cousin, Thomas Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck’s
grandson by his second son David. He managed to get the settlement
upset on the plea that in the deed the first five letters of the word
_irredeemably_ were written upon an erasure.[807] It is not impossible
that the lawyer who drew it up, not liking the provision, intentionally
contrived this loop-hole.
Among Boswell’s male descendants, his second son James was, so far as
I know, the only one who was not ashamed of the _Life of Johnson_. He
supplied notes to the later editions. His father, writing of him when
he was eleven years old, says: “My second son is an extraordinary boy;
he is much of his father (vanity of vanities).”[808] Croker describes
him as “very convivial, and in other respects like his father—though
altogether on a smaller scale.”[809] According to Lockhart, he was “a
man of considerable learning and admirable social qualities. To him Sir
Walter Scott was warmly attached. He died suddenly in the prime of
life, about a fortnight before his brother.”[810]
When Boswell, at the age of twenty-seven, published his _Account of
Corsica_, he boasted in his preface that “he cherished the hope of
being remembered after death, which has been a great object to the
noblest minds in all ages.” When he saw his _Life of Johnson_ reach its
second edition, he said with a frankness which is almost touching, “I
confess that I am so formed by nature and by habit, that to restrain
the effusion of delight on having obtained such fame, to me would
be truly painful. Why then should I suppress it? Why ‘out of the
abundance of the heart’ should I not speak?” He goes on to mention
the spontaneous praise which he has received from eminent persons,
“much of which,” he adds, “I have under their hands to be reposited
in my archives at Auchinleck.” How little did he foresee that his
executors, with a brutish ignorance worthy of perpetual execration,
would destroy his manuscripts! If Oliver Goldsmith had had children and
grand-children, they too, when they read of his envy and his vanity,
when they were told that “in conversation he was an empty, noisy,
blundering rattle,”[811] might have blushed to own that they were
sprung from the author of _The Deserted Village_ and _The Vicar of
Wakefield_.
[Sidenote: BOSWELL’S DESCENDANTS.]
It is a melancholy thing that Boswell’s descendants should have seen
their famous ancestor’s faults so clearly as to have been unable to
enjoy that pride which was so justly their due, in being sprung from
a man of such real, if curious genius. Was it nothing to have written
the best biography which the world has ever seen? Nothing to have
increased more than any writer of his generation “the public stock of
harmless pleasure?” Nothing to have “exhibited” with the greatest skill
“a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near half a
century?” Nothing to have been the delight of men of the greatest and
most varied genius? Nothing to be read wherever the English tongue is
spoken, and, as seems likely, as long as the English tongue shall last?
_Sume superbiam quæsitam meritis_, “Assume the honours justly thine,”
we would say to each one of his race.
[Sidenote: BOSWELL’S FAME.]
How widely Boswell’s influence is felt is shown in a story which was
told me by Sir Charles Sikes, the benevolent inventor of the Post
Office Savings Banks, and no mean Johnsonian. One day he had gone
under an archway in Fleet Street to shun a shower, as Burke might have
gone.[812] Being “knowing and conversible,” he fell into talk with a
sergeant of police who was also taking shelter, and whose tongue showed
that he was an Irishman. He came, he said, from the west of Ireland.
When he was a boy the parish priest had lent him a copy of the _Life
of Johnson_. He had read it again and again, till at last the wish
grew so strong upon him to see with his own eyes the scenes which in
the pages of the book were so familiar to him, that he came to London,
not knowing what employment he should find, but bent on seeing Fleet
Street. What pilgrimages have not men made from the other side of the
Atlantic to the same spots! With their Boswell in their hands they have
wandered by Charing Cross, “with its full tide of human existence;” up
the Strand, “through the greatest series of shops in the world;” under
Temple Bar, where Johnson’s and Goldsmith’s names did _not_ mingle
with those of the Scotch rebels[813]; along Fleet Street, with “its
very animated appearance,” to the courts and lanes and taverns where
the spirits of the men who gathered round the great Lexicographer seem
still to linger. The Boswells are proud of their descent from a man
who fell at Flodden Field. There are thousands and ten thousands of
Scotchmen who got knocked on their heads in border forays, but only
one who wrote the _Life of Johnson_. “The chief glory of every people
arises from its authors,” and among Scotch authors Sir Walter Scott
alone equals Boswell in the extent of his popularity. The genius of
Burns lies hidden from most Englishmen in the dialect in which his
finest poetry is written. Never did one man of letters do another a
more shameful wrong than when Macaulay laboured at the ridiculous
paradox that the first of biographers was “a man of the meanest and
feeblest intellect.” He was thirty years old when he wrote this. Yet,
to borrow Johnson’s words, it was such stuff as a young man talks when
he first begins to think himself a clever fellow, and he ought to have
been whipped for it. The worst of it is that Macaulay, like Rousseau,
talked his nonsense so well that it still passes for gospel with all
those who have advanced as far as reading, but have not as yet attained
to thinking. We may feel thankful that he did not with his overpowering
common sense go on to overwhelm the memory of Goldsmith.
In the price set on autographs we have a means of measuring in some
fashion the estimation in which men are held by posterity. The standard
is but a rough one, however, for it is affected by the number of their
writings which chance to have been preserved: judging by it, Boswell’s
rank is very high. There were, probably, few men whose career he more
envied than that of Lord Bute’s “errand-goer,” Alexander Wedderburne,
who rose to be Lord Loughborough, Earl of Rosslyn and Lord High
Chancellor of England. Yet a letter of his I have recently seen offered
for sale at ten shillings and sixpence, while Boswell’s was marked nine
guineas. While I exult at seeing that one author equals eighteen Lord
Chancellors, I sometimes sigh over the high prices which have hitherto
kept me from obtaining a specimen of the handwriting of a man at whose
works I have so long laboured.
It is to be hoped that the day will at length come when those in whose
veins Boswell’s blood still flows will take that just and reasonable
view of their famous forefather which will lead them, from time to
time, to throw open “the rocks and woods,” and even “the stately house”
of Auchinleck to strangers from afar. It was he who “Johnsonised
the land,” and they therefore should have some indulgence for the
enthusiasm which he created. “The sullen dignity of the castle with
which Johnson was delighted” they should not keep altogether to
themselves. Another famous man had beheld those ruins also. “Since
Paoli stood upon our old castle,” wrote Boswell to a friend, “it has
an additional dignity.” Who would not like to stand upon it also, and
to see the Lugar running beneath, “bordered by high rocks shaded with
wood?” Into this beautiful stream falls “a pleasing brook,” to use
Johnson’s odd description of a rivulet which has cut a deep passage
through the sandstone. “It runs,” he adds, “by a red rock, out of which
has been hewn a very agreeable and commodious summer-house.” I have
been told that the meeting of the waters is a scene of striking beauty.
Then there are “the venerable old trees under the shade of which,”
writes Boswell, “my ancestors had walked,” and the groves where, as
he told Johnson, it was his intention to erect a monument to his
“reverend friend.” “Sir,” he answered, little flattered by the prospect
of “a lapidary inscription,” “I hope to see your grand-children.” Who
would not gladly stroll along Lord Auchinleck’s _via sacra_, “that
road which he made to the church, for above three miles, on his own
estate, through a range of well-inclosed farms, with a row of trees on
each side of it?” The avenue is composed mainly of oaks and beeches,
planted alternately; but the finest of the trees were brought down a
few years ago in a great storm which swept over the country. Only one
or two small farms remain, but there are the ruins of another. From
the road a most pleasant view is seen, grassy slopes running down to
the Lugar, with hedge-rows and trees growing in them after the English
fashion. Across the river the ground rises rapidly in tilled fields and
meadows and groves to a high range of hills. To the south-west lies the
village of Ochiltree, whence Scott perhaps derived old Edie’s name in
the _Antiquary_.
[Sidenote: AUCHINLECK MANSE.]
The manse still stands where Johnson dined with the Rev. John Dun, who
had been Boswell’s _dominie_, and had been rewarded for his services
by the presentation to the living of Auchinleck. He rashly attacked
before his guest the Church of England, and “talked of fat bishops and
drowsy deans. Dr. Johnson was so highly offended, that he said to him,
‘Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot.’” Dun must have
complained to Boswell of being thus publicly likened to the proverbial
Hottentot, for in the second edition of the _Tour to the Hebrides_ his
name is suppressed. The manse has been enlarged since those days, and
surrounded with a delightful garden which might excite the envy, if
not of a drowsy dean, at all events of a south country vicar. In the
venerable minister, Dr. James Chrystal, who has lived there for more
than fifty years, Johnson would have found a man “whom, if he should
have quarrelled with him, he would have found the most difficulty how
to abuse.”
[Sidenote: AUCHINLECK CHURCHYARD.]
The parish church where Johnson refused to attend Boswell and his
father at public worship has been rebuilt. In the churchyard stands a
fine old beech which might have been called venerable even a hundred
years ago. There, too, is the vault of the Boswells with their
coat-of-arms engraved on it, and their motto, _Vraye Foy_. In a niche
cut in the solid rock lies Boswell’s body. He died in London, at his
house in Great Portland Street, but in accordance with the direction
in his will he was buried “in the family burial-place in the church
of Auchinleck.” Though the vault is now at a little distance from the
church, yet in the old building, which did not occupy precisely the
same site, it was under a room at the back of the Boswells’ pew. On
a wall in the churchyard I noticed a curiously-carved stone with the
following inscription:
M
G. W.
1621
M. G.
HUNC TUMULUM CONJUNX
POSUIT DILECTA MARITO.
QUEMQUE VIRO POSUIT
DESTINAT HORA SIBI.
————
THIS STONE WAS ERECTED
1621
IN MEMORY OF THE