WHO WAS PASTOR OF THIS PARISH.
REPAIRED BY OLD MORTALITY
IN HIS DAY
AND RENEWED AND PLACED HERE IN
1855.
“Auchinleck,” said the landlady of my inn, “is the very heart of the
Covenanters’ district.” Hard by, at Airdsmoss, the founder of the
Cameronians, with seven or eight of his followers, was slain in July,
1681. In the churchyard lies buried a man of a very different type
of character—William Murdoch, the inventor of gas. Two of Boswell’s
tenants were James and William Murdoch. They and their forefathers
had possessed their farms for many generations.[814] Perhaps not only
the _Life of Boswell_, but illumination by gas takes its rise from
Auchinleck.
The village consists mainly of one long street of solidly-built stone
houses; the older ones thatched and often white-washed, the modern
ones slated. At the back are good gardens well stocked with fruit
trees. Bare feet are far more common here than in the Highlands or
Hebrides. All the children, with scarcely an exception, and many of
the women, go bare-footed. As I passed down the street a “roup,” or
sale by auction, was going on before the house of a deceased “baker,
violin-maker, clock-mender, blood-letter, dentist, geologist, and
collector of coins.” The auctioneer, standing on the doorstep of this
departed worthy, who at one and the same time had played many parts,
dispersed his motley goods to the four quarters of heaven. The best
of his violins, for he had had some of considerable value, had been
sent for sale to Glasgow. I stayed in the Railway Hotel, a curious old
house, which boasted of two sitting-rooms and one bed-room. It was
clean and comfortable, and in my courteous landlady I found a woman of
sense and education. She quoted _Sartor Resartus_, and spoke with anger
of Mr. Froude’s _Life of Carlyle_. In Scotland the traveller finds
book-learning far more generally diffused than in England.
In Boswell’s time Auchinleck, he tells us, was pronounced Affléck. His
grand-daughter, who died in 1836, informed Mr. Croker that in her time
it had come to be pronounced as it is written. I learnt however from
Dr. Chrystal that “the name Affléck is still quite common as applied
to the parish, and even Auchinleck House is as often called Place
Affléck as otherwise.” A lad whom I questioned on the subject told me
that the old people call it Affléck but the young Auchinleck. The old
pronunciation will no doubt soon disappear.
[Sidenote: BOSWELL AS A LANDLORD.]
Boswell had been a kind landlord. Johnson, in the early days of their
acquaintance, “had recommended to him a liberal kindness to his
tenantry, as people over whom the proprietor was placed by Providence.”
The advice was congenial to his natural disposition. In his will,
which he made ten years before his death, he says: “As there are
upon the estate of Auchinleck several tenants whose families have
possessed their farms for many generations, I do by these presents
grant leases for nineteen years and their respective lives to”—here
follow the names of eight tenants. He continues:—“And I do beseech all
the succeeding heirs of entail to be kind to the tenants, and not to
turn out old possessors to get a little more rent.” We may venture to
express a hope that his descendants, if they have slighted him as an
author, have always honoured and followed him as a landlord.
[Illustration: NEW HAILES.]
HAMILTON, EDINBURGH, NEW HAILES, BALLENCRIEFF, AND CRANSTON, NOVEMBER
8-22.
[Sidenote: FROM AUCHINLECK TO EDINBURGH.]
Leaving Auchinleck on the morning of November 8, our travellers
arrived that night at Hamilton on the road to Edinburgh. They had
crossed Drumclog Moor, the scene of the skirmish nearly one hundred
years earlier where Claverhouse was beaten by the Covenanters. Scott
in _Old Mortality_ has told how in the fight John Balfour of Burley
struck down Sergeant Bothwell. Fifty years or so after our travellers
crossed the Moor, Thomas Carlyle and Edward Irving passed over it on
foot. “It was here,” says Carlyle, “as the sun was sinking, Irving
drew from me by degrees, in the softest manner, the confession that I
did not think as he of the Christian religion, and that it was vain
for me to expect I ever could or should.”[815] Boswell’s record of
this day’s journey is of the briefest. “We came at night to a good
inn at Hamilton. I recollect no more.” A writer in the _Gentleman’s
Magazine_ gives us a humorous description of the innkeeper. “Hamilton
Arms, kept by Burns, tolerable. The landlord from pure insipidity will
laugh at you if you come in wet through; yet he can tell a good deal
about the Duke’s family.”[816] Smollett gives the little town the
highest praise in his vocabulary, by calling it “one of the neatest he
had seen in any country.”[817] Whatever nature could do, the force of
art could no farther go last century than make a place neat. Boswell,
before they left next morning, in vain tried to move Johnson to visit
the Palace of Hamilton, as the Duke’s castle is called. “He had not
come to Scotland to see fine places of which there were enough in
England.” He would do nothing more than view the outside. [Sidenote:
RETURN TO EDINBURGH.] That same night “they arrived at Edinburgh
after an absence of eighty-three days. For five weeks together of the
tempestuous season,” adds Boswell, “there had been no account received
of us.” Yet, as the crow flies, they had never at their farthest been
two hundred miles away. How vast is the change since those days! I
received the other day at my house in Oxford, a letter which had been
posted in Bombay just fifteen days before. Johnson would have hurried
on to London had he followed his own wishes. “I long to come under
your care,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale a day or two after his arrival in
Edinburgh, “but for some days cannot decently get away.” He had his
morning levees to hold, and his dinner and supper parties to attend.
“‘Sir,’ he said one evening, ‘we have been harassed by invitations.’ I
acquiesced. ‘Ay, sir,’ he replied, ‘but how much worse would it have
been if we had been neglected!’” There was one man who did not harass
him. Boswell nowhere mentions that he visited Lord Auchinleck at his
house in Parliament Close.
[Sidenote: LORD HAILES.]
He paid a visit to New Hailes, four miles east of Edinburgh, the seat
of Sir David Dalrymple, better known by the title of Lord Hailes,
which he bore as one of the judges of Scotland. “Here,” says Boswell,
“we passed a most agreeable day, but,” he adds, “again I must lament
that I was so indolent as to let almost all that passed evaporate into
oblivion.” Johnson had first heard of his host ten years earlier. One
evening, when he and Boswell were supping in a private room at the
Turk’s Head Coffee-house in the Strand, “he drank a bumper to Sir David
Dalrymple as ‘a man of worth, a scholar, and a wit. I have,’ said he,
‘never heard of him, except from you; but let him know my opinion of
him; for, as he does not show himself much in the world, he should have
the praise of the few who hear of him.’” They did not meet till Johnson
came to Edinburgh, but then they at once took to each other. “I love
him better than any man whom I know so little,” wrote Johnson eighteen
months later. His love was no doubt increased by the decision which
his friend gave a few years later in that famous case in which it was
decided, by a majority of the judges, that a slave who had been brought
from Jamaica to Scotland became thereby free. “Dear Lord Hailes was
on the side of liberty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell.[818] He would have
loved him still more for the tenderness of heart which, unlike so many
of his brethren, he showed on the Bench. “When called to pass sentence
of death he addressed the unfortunate convicts in a pathetic, dignified
strain of piety and commiseration that made a deep impression on the
audience.”[819] Many of the old judges, as is shown by the stories
recorded of them, were in criminal trials little better than ruffians
in ermine. If “robes and furred gowns hide all,” in many a case they
had far more cruelty to cover than the unfortunate prisoner had been
guilty of who was sent to the gallows. Lord Hailes, with all his
kindness, was by no means faultless as a judge. He too often allowed
his pedantry to override his good sense. This failing in his friend,
Boswell took off in his comic poem _The Court of Session Garland_:
“‘This cause,’ cries Hailes, ‘to judge I can’t pretend,
For _justice_, I perceive, wants an _e_ at the end.’”
According to Dr. Robert Chambers “a story was told of his once making
a serious objection to a law-paper, and in consequence to the whole
suit, on account of the word _justice_ being thus spelt.”[820] Lord
Braxfield, one of the ruffian judges, but a man of strong mind,
“hearing him praised as a good judge, said, in his vulgar way, ‘Him!
he knows nothing but the nooks of a cause.’ He was not without his
crotchets. One day when he sat as President, he reprimanded a lawyer
very sharply for making a ludicrous application of some text in the
Gospels or Epistles. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you may take liberties with the
Old Testament, but I will not suffer you to meddle with the New.’”[821]
As an historian he had considerable merits. Johnson revised the
proof-sheets of his _Annals of Scotland_, and found them “a new mode
of history in our language.” “They are very exact,” he added, “but
they contain mere dry particulars. They are to be considered as a
Dictionary. You know such things are there, and may be looked at when
you please.”[822] Gibbon praised him as “a diligent collector, and an
accurate critic;” but he complained that when he came to criticise “the
two invidious chapters” in the _Decline and Fall_, “he scrutinized each
separate passage with the dry minuteness of a special pleader; and
as he was always solicitous to make, he may have succeeded sometimes
in finding a flaw.”[823] Hume spoke of him with contempt. “He is a
godly man; feareth the Lord and escheweth evil, and works out his
salvation with fear and trembling. None of the books he publishes are
of his writing; they are all historical manuscripts, of little or no
consequence.”[824] “Nothing delighted him more,” writes Ramsay of
Ochtertyre, “than to demolish some historical fabric which length of
time had rendered venerable. I lent an old lady the first volume of his
_Annals_. She was so ill-pleased with the rejection of some popular
stories of Wallace, that she said she would drive the powder out of his
lordship’s wig if she were by him.”[825] With all his critical power he
was a believer in Ossian. Burke, who once met him at dinner, “found him
a clever man, and generally knowing.”[826]
[Sidenote: LORD HAILES AND DR. HALLAM.]
He had been educated at Eton, and there one day had noticed a little
black-looking boy, who had come up “_to show for college_, _i.e._, to
stand for a scholarship on the foundation.”
“After being examined he was found entitled to be placed high
in the fourth form, if he could make a copy of Latin verses
in a given time. As he knew nothing of the matter, his friend
bade him throw the theme assigned him over the window[827]
in a quill, and he would convey him the verses ere they were
wanted. He told the door-keeper to carry a pen-case to the lad
under examination, who exhibited the theme, and was elected.
For some months Dalrymple lent him his aid in versifying. Dr.
Hallam, now Dean of Bristol and Canon of Westminster, confessed
many years after, with tears in his eyes, that next to the
providence of God he owed all that he had to the philanthropy
of Sir David Dalrymple.”[828]
If, as seems likely, the examination was competitive, the boy who did
not get the scholarship might not have taken altogether the same view
of the matter as the pious and tearful dean. Dr. Hallam was the father
of the historian, and the grandfather of Arthur Hallam. Had it not been
for Lord Hailes’s good-natured roguery the _In Memoriam_ might never
have been written.
[Illustration: LIBRARY, NEW HAILES.]
[Sidenote: NEW HAILES.]
New Hailes, as Johnson’s host told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “had been
first made by Mr. Smith, a Popish architect employed in fitting up
King James’s chapel at the Abbey. He planted the oldest trees. It was
acquired by Lord Hailes’s grandfather, the Lord Advocate, who gave it
its present name.”[829] We may wonder where poor Mr. Smith sought
shelter that day when the news reached Edinburgh that James II. had
fled from London. He may well have been in danger, for “the rabble,”
writes Burnet, “broke into the church of Holyrood House, which had
been adorned at a great charge to be a royal chapel, defaced it quite,
and seized on some that were thought great delinquents.”[830] When
Lord Hailes came into the property, “his first care was to fit up the
library—a magnificent room. The furnishing of it with an ample store
of books was the great object of his ambition.”[831] The library is now
the drawing-room—the most noble and learned drawing-room that I have
ever seen, for the great and well-filled book-shelves still go round it
from the floor almost to the lofty ceiling. If it was in this room that
Johnson was received, no doubt he behaved as he did that April day,
a year or two later, when he drove down to dine with Mr. Cambridge
at Twickenham. “No sooner,” says Boswell, “had we made our bow to Mr.
Cambridge in his library than Johnson ran eagerly to one side of the
room, intent on poring over the backs of the books.” Perhaps he turned
to Lord Hailes, as he turned to Dr. Burney, on seeing his library, and
said, “You are an honest man to have formed so great an accumulation of
knowledge.”[832]
The house, like so many in Scotland, is built more after the
continental than the English fashion. In the front is a square
courtyard, on a level with which are the offices. The hall is reached
by a flight of stone steps. As I came up to it a peacock was perched
on the top. Above the door is inscribed the motto, _Laudo manentem_.
Johnson’s bedroom was at one end of the house, on the same floor as
the hall; but as the ground is higher on this side, it was on a level
with the flower-garden, which was just beneath the windows. He had also
a dressing-room, whence I looked out on pleasant hayfields, where the
haymakers were hard at work. All about the house are fine trees, many
of them planted, no doubt, by the old Popish architect; while on one
side there is a lofty grove of beeches with a column in the middle,
inscribed—
“Joanni Comiti de Stair
De Patria et Principe optime merito
Viventi positum
MDCCXLVI.”
The Earl of Stair was a Dalrymple. At the Jacobite rebellion in 1745
he had been appointed Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the
Forces in South Britain.[833] Horace Walpole did not think highly of
his services at this time for, after describing in the November of that
year how “the Prince of Wales, the night of his son’s christening, had
the citadel of Carlisle in sugar at supper, and the company besieged
it with sugar-plums,” he continues, “One thing was very proper; old
Marshal Stair was there, who is grown child enough to be fit to war
only with such artillery.”[834] We can picture to ourselves Johnson
walking up and down under the beech trees, reading the inscription,
and telling how kindly he had been welcomed a few days earlier by
the earl’s sister, the Countess of Loudoun, an old lady, “who in her
ninety-fifth year had all her faculties entire. This,” adds Boswell,
“was a very cheering sight to Dr. Johnson, who had an extraordinary
desire for long life.”
With such a pleasant spot as this to live at, it is not surprising
that Lord Hailes for many years would not take a house in Edinburgh,
but resided constantly at New Hailes summer and winter “driving in
every morning in session time before breakfast, and returning before
dinner.” Dr. Alexander Carlyle, who was no bad judge of conviviality,
said, “that nowhere did he get more good wine or more good _cracks_
than from Lord Hailes.”[835] Besides his learning and his hospitality
he had, like so many of Johnson’s Scotch friends, deserved the praise
of being a good landlord. He did not raise his rents.[836] [Sidenote:
LORD HAILES’S WILL.] On his death his will could not be found. He
had no sons, and the heir-male was about to take possession of his
estates to the exclusion of his daughter, Miss Hailes. She had made
her preparations for leaving her old home, and had sent some of her
servants to lock up his town house in New Street. As one of them was
closing the shutters of a window the will dropped out upon the floor
from behind a panel. It was found to secure her in the possession of
the estates. She enjoyed them for upwards of forty years.[837]
[Sidenote: LORD ELIBANK.]
Johnson paid a visit also to Patrick, Lord Elibank, and stayed two
nights “at his seat in the country.” I at first thought that this was
Darnhall, near Peebles, and accordingly visited that most delightful
spot. But I have little doubt that it was at Ballencrieff, in the
neighbourhood of Haddington, where he stayed.[838] Smollett, when he
takes Matthew Bramble through this part of the country, makes him say:
“I intended to pay my respects to Lord Elibank, whom I had the honour
to know at London many years ago. He lives in this part of Lothian,
but was gone to the North on a visit. I have long revered him for his
humanity and universal intelligence, over and above the entertainment
arising from the originality of his character.”[839] He was a Jacobite,
and a member of that famous Cocoa Tree Club, which, according to
Boswell, “was sacred of old to loyalty.” The loyalty, by the way, was
rather towards the third James than the second George. Horace Walpole
tells how, after Culloden, “the Duke of Cumberland gave Brigadier
Mordaunt the Pretender’s coach, on condition he rode up to London
in it. ‘That I will, Sir,’ said he, ‘and drive till it stops of its
own accord at the Cocoa Tree.’”[840] Lord Elibank had been deeper in
the cause than was known at the time. According to Sir Walter Scott,
the Stuart Papers show that “he carried on a correspondence with the
Chevalier after 1745, which was not suspected by his most intimate
friends.”[841] He probably was made to pay dearly for his attachment
to the exiled family. Lord Cromartie, one of the rebel lords, “had
been,” says Walpole, “receiver of the rents of the king’s second son
in Scotland, which it was understood he should not account for, and
by that means had six hundred pounds a year from the Government.
Lord Elibank, a very prating, impertinent Jacobite, was bound for
him in nine thousand pounds, for which the duke is determined to sue
him.”[842] If the money was exacted, the loss must have been severely
felt, for Elibank was somewhat parsimonious. “When he heard of John
Home’s pension, he said, ‘It is a very laudable grant, and I rejoice at
it; but it is no more in the power of the king to make John Home rich
than to make me poor.’”[843] Perhaps when he said this he was thinking
how the king had done his best to impoverish him by exacting “the
penalty and forfeit of his bond,” and had failed.
One day he and Dr. Robertson called on Johnson at Boswell’s house,
and the talk turned on the Rebellion. Lord Elibank, addressing the
historian, said: “Mr. Robertson, the first thing that gave me a high
opinion of you was your saying in the Select Society, while parties ran
high, soon after the year 1745, that you did not think worse of a man’s
moral character for his having been in rebellion. This was venturing
to utter a liberal sentiment, while both sides had a detestation of
each other.” Such a sentiment must have been particularly comforting to
a man who perhaps was still plotting treason. The Select Society had
been founded in 1754 by Allan Ramsay the painter, aided by Robertson,
Hume, and Adam Smith. “It rubbed off all corners by collision,” says
Dr. Carlyle, “and made the _literati_ of Edinburgh less captious and
pedantic than they were elsewhere.”[844] If collision always rubbed off
corners, there was enough between Elibank and Hume to have produced
the greatest smoothness and even polish. The historian, in the fifth
volume of his _History of England_, speaks of him as “a person that has
writ an _Enquiry historical and critical into the evidence against Mary
Queen of Scots_.” He goes on to accuse him with having “almost directly
called him a liar,” and charges him in his turn with being guilty of
“scandalous artifices.” He concludes with that well-known passage, in
which he maintains that “there are indeed three events in our history
which may be regarded as touchstones of party-men. An English Whig,
who asserts the reality of the Popish Plot, an Irish Catholic, who
denies the massacre in 1641, and a Scotch Jacobite, who maintains the
innocence of Queen Mary, must be considered as men beyond the reach of
argument or reason, and must be left to their prejudices.”[845] In a
letter to Robertson, written some years earlier than this note, Hume
says: “I desire my compliments to Lord Elibank. I hope his lordship
has forgot his vow of answering us, and of washing Queen Mary white. I
am afraid that is impossible; but his lordship is very well qualified
to gild her.”[846] Hume, with all his good nature, was not a little
touchy, and perhaps took offence where no offence was meant. Lord
Elibank had been “the early patron of Robertson and Home, the tragick
poet, who when they were ministers of country parishes, lived near his
seat. He told me,” continues Boswell, “‘I saw these lads had talents,
and they were much with me.’ I hope they will pay a grateful tribute
to his memory.” According to Dr. Carlyle, they found a far better way
of showing their gratitude, for “they cured him of his contempt for
the Presbyterian clergy, made him change or soften down many of his
original opinions, and prepared him for becoming a most agreeable
member of the Literary Society of Edinburgh, among whom he lived during
the remainder of his life, admiring and admired.”[847] Besides his
_Enquiry_, he published several other “small pieces of distinguished
merit,” according to Boswell. National Debts and the Currency were
among the subjects of which he treated.[848] Dr. Carlyle describes
him as “rather a humourist than a man of humour; one who defended
paradoxes and uncommon opinions with a copiousness and ingenuity that
was surprising.” This part of his character would have endeared him to
Johnson, who liked a tavern because, as he said, “wine there prompts
me to free conversation, and an interchange of discourse with those
whom I most love; I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict
of opinions and sentiments I find delight.”[849] Though Johnson was
fond of his society, and once said “that he was never in his company
without learning something,” yet speaking of him on another occasion he
said, “Sir, there is nothing conclusive in his talk.” Lord Elibank’s
admiration of Johnson was very high. Yet he need not have gone so far
as to flatter him at the expense of his own country. Having missed
seeing him on his first visit to Edinburgh, he wrote to Boswell: “I
could not persuade myself there was anything in Scotland worthy to have
a summer of Samuel Johnson bestowed on it; but since he has done us
that compliment, for heaven’s sake inform me of your motions. I will
attend them most religiously, and though I should regret to let Mr.
Johnson go a mile out of his way on my account, old as I am, I shall be
glad to go five hundred miles to enjoy a day of his company.” Johnson,
in his plain truthfulness, on the very day on which Lord Elibank
wrote this extravagant letter, said that “he would go two miles out
of his way to see Lord Monboddo.” As five hundred to two, so perhaps
was Johnson’s accuracy of talk to Lord Elibank’s. To the mean way in
which his lordship spoke of Scotland, as if it were beneath the great
Englishman’s notice, I much prefer the spirit of his countryman, who,
according to Boswell, “would say of Dr. Johnson, ‘Damned rascal! to
talk as he does of the Scotch!’” However, he had none of that smallness
of mind common enough among the high-born, which would not let him
enjoy Johnson’s strong talk. He was “one of the great who sought his
society. He well observed that if a great man procured an interview
with him, and did not wish to see him more, it showed a mere idle
curiosity, and a wretched want of relish for extraordinary powers of
mind.” Such an idle curiosity and such a wretched want of relish were
shown by George III.
[Illustration: TREES AT BALLENCRIEFF
PLANTED AT D^{r.} JOHNSON’S SUGGESTION
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
[Sidenote: BALLENCRIEFF.]
The old house at Ballencrieff, in which Johnson “passed two nights and
dined thrice,” as Boswell accurately records, is now a melancholy ruin.
It was burnt down about twenty years ago. For many years previously,
deserted by its owners, it had been left in the care of a woman who
lived in an outbuilding, which in the old days had formed the kitchen.
It was here, I believe, that were prepared those “performances
of a nobleman’s French cook which so much displeased Johnson, that
he exclaimed with vehemence, ‘I’d throw such a rascal into the
river.’”[850] Though the flames no longer roared up the chimney as
they had done for many a long year, still a fire was kept up and soot
accumulated. One day the old woman tried to get rid of it by setting it
alight, a primitive mode of chimney-sweeping not uncommon in that part
of the country. A spark, it is conjectured, was carried into the main
building through a broken pane, and falling on some straw brought in
by the birds who nested there, set an upper room on fire. The summer
had been unusually dry. The flames spread rapidly from one end of the
house to the other; so fierce was the blaze that a large beech-tree
which stood at some little distance was burnt also. Part of the house
is evidently of considerable antiquity, being very solidly built, with
vaulted chambers and walls many feet in thickness. In the year 1625, as
I judge from an inscription on the wall, great additions were made. It
is pleasantly placed, with meadow-land on three sides, and at a little
distance from a fine range of hills, which boasts of a Roman camp and
of a lofty column to one of Wellington’s generals. So strangely do the
ages mingle here. From the upper windows on a clear day a delightful
view must have been enjoyed of the Forth, with the little island of
Inch Keith and the hills of Fife beyond. Near the house there is a row
of yew-trees which could not have looked young in Johnson’s time, and
holly hedges leading up to it, between which, perhaps, he walked, for
they too look old. The land is in the occupation of a market-gardener,
who cultivates it with a success which would have won his praise, and
made him allow that something beside the sloe is brought to perfection
in Scotland. The whole district abounds in fruitful gardens and
orchards, and fine plantations of trees. As I looked at the luxuriance
of growth, and meditated on the change that had been wrought in a
century and a quarter, I thought that to Johnson, who had shown the
nakedness of the land, a grateful and penitent people, who had profited
by his exhortations, should raise a memorial as the god of gardens.
According to a tradition which has come down to our time, a group of
ash-trees was planted by Lord Elibank on his suggestion.[851] Planting
had begun earlier than he thought. “It may be doubted,” he said,
“whether before the Union any man between Edinburgh and England had
ever set a tree.” The market-gardener told me that he had counted one
hundred and ninety rings on some tall trees near the house, which had
been cut down fourteen years before. This would show that they were
planted not only before the Union, but also before the Revolution, for
though a ring marks the growth of a year, yet in an old tree many of
the rings cannot be distinguished.
[Illustration: BALLENCRIEFF.]
As I wandered about the ruins, and listened to the jackdaws chattering
overhead “with nothing conclusive in their talk,” how much I regretted
that Boswell’s indolence had kept him from recording the conversation
which passed here in those three November days between the old Jacobite
lord and his famous guest.
Johnson’s tour was rapidly drawing to a close. Brundusium is at hand.
“Brundusium longæ finis chartæque viæque.”[852]
[Sidenote: SIR JOHN DALRYMPLE.]
He wrote from Edinburgh to Mrs. Thrale on Thursday, November 18: “I
long to be at home, and have taken a place in the coach for Monday;
I hope, therefore, to be in London on Friday, the 26th, in the
evening. Please to let Mrs. Williams know.” On Saturday he accepted
the invitation of Sir John Dalrymple, a cousin of Lord Hailes, and
author of _Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland_, to visit him at his
house at Cranston, twelve miles from Edinburgh on the middle road to
Newcastle. There he was to be taken up by the London coach. Three
years earlier Boswell had described Dalrymple as “a very knowing,
lively companion;”[853] but his feelings towards him were changed.
He had not worshipped the image which he had set up. Nevertheless,
“he was ambitious,” Boswell writes, “of having such a guest; but as I
was well assured, that at this very time he had joined with some of
his prejudiced countrymen in railing at Dr. Johnson, and had said,
he wondered how any gentleman of Scotland could keep company with
him, I thought he did not deserve the honour; yet, as it might be a
convenience to Dr. Johnson, I contrived that he should accept the
invitation, and engaged to conduct him.” The convenience consisted in
the fact that, as his house was on the London road, Johnson would not
have to rise so early by two hours to catch the coach. Dalrymple had
lately made a good deal of stir both in the world of literature and
politics by the publication of his _Memoirs_. From these it had been
learnt for the first time that Algernon Sidney had been a pensioner
of the King of France. Horace Walpole had been roused to anger by the
exposure of a man whose memory he revered. “Need I tell you,” he wrote
to Mason, “that Sir John Dalrymple, the accuser of bribery, was turned
out of his place of Solicitor of the Customs for taking bribes from
brewers?”[854] Hume was astonished at “the rage against him, on account
of the most commendable action in his life,” but he despised “his
ranting, bouncing style.”[855] Johnson had an equal contempt for it,
calling it “his foppery.” Boswell records in the spring of the year:
“I mentioned Sir John Dalrymple’s _Memoirs of Great Britain and
Ireland_, and his discoveries to the prejudice of Lord Russell
and Algernon Sidney. JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, every body who had
just notions of government thought them rascals before. It
is well that all mankind now see them to be rascals.... This
Dalrymple seems to be an honest fellow; for he tells equally
what makes against both sides. But nothing can be poorer than
his mode of writing, it is the mere bouncing of a schoolboy:
Great He! but greater She! and such stuff.’”
In describing the last scene between Lord and Lady Russell he had said,
“they parted for ever—he great in this last act of his life, but she
greater.”[856]
His portrait, which I saw in the Loan Exhibition of the Scottish
National Portrait Gallery, shows a cold conceited face. Dr. Carlyle
gives an unpleasing account of him. After recounting how at a dinner
he had once had “to divide a haunch of venison among fifteen without
getting any portion of fat for himself,” he continues, “But what
signifies that, when you have an opportunity of obliging your friends?
as Sir J. Dalrymple said to me one day when we had a haunch at the
Poker, flattering me for a good piece, for he was a gourmand.”[857]
How must the indignation of this flattering glutton have been
excited at the careless and even rude treatment which he received
from our travellers, who had engaged to dine with him on the day they
left Edinburgh! They were very late in starting, for Johnson in his
good-nature had let himself be detained “by young Mr. Tytler who came
to show some essays which he had written.” They did not leave till
one o’clock, and then Boswell insisted on their going to see Rosslyn
Castle and the Chapel. They dined and drank tea at the inn. As if this
were not enough, and as if no baronet were waiting dinner, they next
went to Hawthornden, and “had _Rare Ben_ in mind” who one hundred and
forty-three years earlier had there visited the poet Drummond. “It
was very late,” writes Boswell, “before we reached the seat of Sir
John Dalrymple, who, certainly with some reason, was not in very good
humour. Our conversation was not brilliant. We supped, and went to bed
in ancient rooms, which would have better suited the climate of Italy
in summer, than that of Scotland in the month of November.” Dalrymple
was alive when this account was published. Not finding their quarters
to their mind they went on next evening two miles further to the inn
at Blackshields. Pennant, who had passed a night there in September of
the previous year, describes “the country as good, full of corn, and
decked with numbers of small woods. The inn is good.”[858] [Sidenote:
A RUNAWAY COUPLE.] Just one year and two days before our travellers
arrived there, on November 19, 1772, one Mr. John Scott of Newcastle
had married, in this same village and most probably in the inn, pretty
Miss Elizabeth Surtees. She had escaped by a ladder from her father’s
house and had run with him across the Border. He was twenty-one and she
eighteen. “Jack Scott,” said a friend on hearing of it, “has run off
with Bessy Surtees, and the poor lad is undone.” In the end he became
Lord Chancellor and Earl of Eldon. The certificate of marriage shows
that the ceremony was performed in the presence of James and Thomas
Fairbairn. From a paper in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ I know that
Fairbairn was the innkeeper’s name.[859]
[Sidenote: THE END OF THE TOUR.]
On the morning of Monday, November 22, the coach took up Johnson and
off he drove homewards. On the following Saturday he wrote to Boswell
from London:—“I came home last night, without any incommodity, danger,
or weariness, and am ready to begin a new journey. I shall go to Oxford
on Monday.” There he met Mr. John Scott and his young bride, and
perhaps compared notes about Blackshields and the Newcastle road.[860]
To his friend, Dr. Taylor, he wrote that “he had traversed the east
coast of Scotland from south to north, from Edinburgh to Inverness, and
the west-coast from north to south, from the Highlands to Glasgow.”[861]
[Illustration: HAWTHORNDEN.]
“The time he spent in his Tour, was,” he often said, “the pleasantest
part of his life.” I too have rarely spent my time more pleasantly than
when I was following his traces both in that beautiful country through
which he wandered, and in those old books in which still live the
people, the manners, and the Scotland which he saw.
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