EDINBURGH LIFE--DEATH OF JOHNSON. 1773-1784
'My father used to protest I was born to be a strolling
pedlar.'--SIR WALTER SCOTT--_Autobiography._
'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 on him.' Boswell had good
grounds for thus expressing himself to Johnson over the publication of
the latter's book. He had not long, it would seem, to wait for the
breaking of the storm, as we find him writing to Temple in ominous
language. 'My father,' he says, '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. I always
dread his making some bad settlement.' Then the old judge would grimly
relate how Lord Crichton, son of the Earl of Dumfries, would go to
Edinburgh, and how, when he was carried back to the family vault, the
Earl, as he saw the hearse from the window, had said, 'Ay, ay, Charles,
thou went without an errand: I think thou hast got one to bring thee
back again.'
But had the son chosen to be quite candid here, we should see how just a
cause the father had for his displeasure. In the spring of 1774, he had
written to Johnson suggesting a run up to London, expressing the
peculiar satisfaction which he felt in celebrating Easter at St Paul's,
which to his fancy was like going up to Jerusalem at the feast of the
Passover. The doctor was wisely deaf to this subtle appeal. 'Edinburgh,'
said he, 'is not yet exhausted,' and reminded him that his wife, having
permitted him last year to ramble, had now a claim upon him at home,
while to come to Iona or to Jerusalem could not be necessary, though
useful. Next year, however, Boswell was in London, 'quite in my old
humour,' as he tells Temple, arguing with him for concubinage and the
plurality of the patriarchs, from all which we may see that the plea
urged to Johnson for the visit was to be taken in a lax sense by
Boswell, who made his chief excuse out of some business at the bar of
the House over an election petition in Clackmannan. He waited on Temple
in Devon and shocked his host by his inebriety, but 'under a solemn yew
tree' he had vowed reformation. But his return to town, if it 'exalted
him in piety' at St Paul's, seems to have led but to fresh dissipation.
He hints at 'Asiatic multiplicity,' but this is only when he has taken
too much claret. The good resolutions at Iona and the influence of the
ruins had passed away, the trip is extended to two months, and he frets
irritably over his old friend Henry Dundas's election as King's
Advocate,--'to be sure he has strong parts, but he is a coarse
unlettered dog.' Harry Dundas at least was never found philandering as
we find Bozzy on this occasion, where the mixture of religion and
flirtation is so confusing. 'After breakfasting with Paoli,' he writes
before leaving for the north, 'and worshipping at St Paul's, I dined
_tete-a-tete_ with my charming Mrs Stuart, of whom you have read in my
Journal. We dined in all the elegance of two courses and a dessert, with
dumb waiters, except when the second course and the dessert were
served. We talked with unreserved freedom, as we had nothing to fear. We
were _philosophical_, upon honour--not deep, but feeling, we were pious;
we drank tea and bid each other adieu as finely as romance paints. She
is my wife's dearest friend, so you see how beautiful our intimacy is.'
But from Johnson's letter to Mrs Thrale we see looming ahead a crisis.
'He got two and forty guineas in fees while he was here. He has by _his
wife's persuasion and mine_ taken down a present for his
mother-in-law,'--an error, doubtless, for 'stepmother.' He had entered
himself this time at the Temple, and Johnson was his bond. He left to be
in time for practice before the General Assembly, finding 'something low
and coarse in such employment, but guineas must be had'--a feeling quite
different from that of Lord Cockburn who thought the aisle of St Giles
had seen the best work of the best men in the kingdom since 1640.
Perhaps his feelings on this point were soothed by the traveller in the
coach, a Miss Silverton, an 'amiable creature who has been in France. I
can unite little fondnesses with perfect conjugal love.' Alas for poor
Peggie Montgomerie, 'of the ancient house of Eglintoun,' blamed by his
father for not bridling the follies of his son, waiting, doubtless,
anxiously for the present to the second wife of his father as a means of
peace-offering!
Then the secret leaks out that the father had refused Boswell's plan of
being allowed L400 a year and the trial of fortune at the London bar.
His debts of L1000 had been paid, and his allowance of L300 threatened
with the reduction of a third. The promise under the old yew had not
been kept; the one bottle of hock as a statutory limit had been
exceeded, he had been 'not drunk, but was intoxicated,'--a subtle point
for bacchanalian casuists, and very ill next day. He lays it on the
drunken habits of the country which, he says, are very bad, and with the
recollection of Burns' temptations in Dumfries we may admit that they
were. His father, too, was now about to entail his estate, and Bozzy's
predilection for feudal principles and heirs male brought things to a
deadlock. He appealed to Lord Hailes, who admitted conscience and self
formed a strong plea when found on different sides. Finally, after the
judge had inserted in the deed his precautions against 'a weak, foolish
and extravagant person,' the estate was entailed on Boswell. 'My
father,' he tells Temple, 'is so different from me. We _divaricate_ so
much, as Dr Johnson said. He has a method of treating me which makes me
feel 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. It requires the utmost exertion of practical
philosophy to keep myself quiet; but it has cost me drinking a
considerable quantity of strong beer to dull my faculties.' The picture
of the son drinking himself down to the level of the father is truly
inimitable!
He feared the final settlement. He might be disgraced by his father, and
not a shilling secured to his wife and children. Then he is comforted by
the thought that his father is visibly failing, and he consults his
brother David with a view to a settlement, should the succession pass to
him. The birth of a son, who was diplomatically called Alexander, was
taken by the old man as a compliment, and we find Boswell visiting at
Auchinleck, 'not long at one time, but frequent renewals of attention
are agreeable,' he finds, to his father. He proposed to Johnson a tour
round the English cathedrals, but a brief trip with him to Derbyshire
was all that resulted. We now find for the first time in the _Life_
indications of what would ensue when the strong hand of Johnson was
removed from the guidance of his weaker companion. 'As we drove back to
Ashbourne,' he writes with curious frankness, 'Dr Johnson recommended to
me, _as he had often done_, to drink water only,' and we meet with as
curious a defence of drinking--the great difficulty of resisting it when
a good man asks you to drink the wine he has had twenty years in his
cellar! Benevolence calls for compliance, for, 'curst be the _spring_,'
he adds with a change of Pope's verse, 'how well soe'er it flow, that
tends to make one worthy man my foe!' 'I do,' he wrote in the _London
Magazine_ for March 1780, 'fairly acknowledge that I love drinking; that
I have a constitutional inclination to indulge in fermented liquors, and
that if it were not for the restraints of reason and religion, I am
afraid that I should be as constant a votary of Bacchus as any man.
Drinking is in reality an occupation which employs a considerable
portion of the time of many people; and to conduct it in the most
rational and agreeable manner is one of the great arts of living. Were
we so framed that it were possible by perpetual supplies of wine to keep
ourselves for ever gay and happy, there could be no doubt that drinking
would be the _summum bonum_, the chief good to find out which
philosophers have been so variously busied.' It looks as if poor Bozzy,
when he wrote this, had heard of the Brunonian system of medicine, and
of the unfortunate exemplication of it in practice and in precept by its
founder in Edinburgh. No wonder such excesses produced violent reaction
to low spirits and the 'black dog' of hypochondria. He finds it, after
going to prayers in Carlisle Cathedral, 'divinely cheering to have a
cathedral so near Auchinleck,' one hundred and fifty miles off, as
Johnson sarcastically replied. Bozzy had been writing a series of
articles, 'The Hypochondriack,' in the _London Magazine_, for about two
years, but he was advised not to mention his own mental diseases, or to
expect for them either the praise for which there was no room, or the
pity which would do him no good. The active old man was now in better
health than he had been upon the Hebridean tour, and was in hopes of yet
shewing himself with Boswell in some part of Europe, Asia, or Africa.
'What have you to do with liberty and necessity?' cries the doctor to
his friend, who had been worrying himself and his correspondent with
philosophical questions, on which some six years before he had got some
light from the _Lettres Persanes_ of Montesquieu. 'Come to me, my dear
Bozzy, and let us be as happy as we can. We will go again to the Mitre,
and talk old times over.' Thrice during the 1781 visit to London do we
see his unfortunate habits breaking out; and, when we find him saying he
has unfortunately preserved none of the conversations, Miss Hannah More,
who met him that day at the Bishop of St Asaph's, explains it--'I was
heartily disgusted with Mr Boswell, who came upstairs after dinner much
disordered with wine.'
Let us hear his own confession over his conduct at the house of Lady
Galway.
'Another evening Johnson's kind indulgence towards me had a pretty
difficult trial. I had dined at the Duke of Montrose's with a very
agreeable party, and his Grace, according to his usual custom, had
circulated the bottle very freely. Lord Graham and I went together to
Miss Monckton's where I certainly was in extraordinary spirits, and
above all fear or awe. In the midst of a great number of persons of the
first rank, amongst whom I recollect with confusion a noble lady of the
most stately decorum, I placed myself next to Johnson, and thinking
myself now fully his match, talked to him in a loud and boisterous
manner, desirous to let the company know how I could contend with Ajax.
I particularly remember pressing him upon the value of the pleasures of
the imagination, and, as an illustration of my argument, asking him,
"What, sir, suppose I were to fancy that the--(naming the most charming
Duchess in his Majesty's dominions) were in love with me, should I not
be very happy?" My friend with much address evaded my interrogatories,
and kept me as quiet as possible, but it may be easily conceived how he
must have felt.'
His father was now dying, and a London trip, which had been planned by
Boswell for 1782, found the son at the very limit of his credit. 'If you
anticipate your inheritance,' he was reminded, 'you can at last inherit
nothing. Poverty (added the old _impransus_ Johnson, out of the depths
of his own experience), my friend, is so great an evil that I cannot but
earnestly enjoin you to avoid it. Live on what you have; live, if you
can, on less.' Lord Auchinleck died suddenly at Edinburgh, on August
30th, 1782; and it was unfortunate for Bozzy that neither at the death
of his father nor of his mother, nor, as we shall see of Johnson, was he
present. The evening of the old man's days had been, we are assured by
Ramsay of Ochtertyre, clouded by the follies and eccentricities of his
son. For thirty years he had been sorely tried; twice he had paid his
debts, he had indulged him with a foreign tour, had provided him with
every means of securing professional success at the bar, only to see
that son do everything to miss it and become everything his father hated
in life--a Tory, an Anglican, and a Jacobite. The new laird was anxious
to display himself on a wider sphere. Johnson was now visibly failing,
and was glad of someone to lean upon for little attentions. 'Boswell,'
he said, 'I think I am easier with you than with almost anybody. Get as
much force of mind as you can. Let your imports be more than your
exports, and you'll never go far wrong.' He reverted to the old days of
the tour in a hopeful strain: 'I should like to come and have a cottage
in your park, toddle about, live mostly on milk, and be taken care of by
Mrs Boswell. She and I are good friends now, are we not?'
In 1783 Boswell appeared before the public with a _Letter to the People
of Scotland_. It was on Fox's proposed bill to regulate the affairs of
the East India Company. Against it he stands forth, 'as an ancient and
faithful Briton, holding an estate transmitted to him by charters from a
series of kings.' Guardedly Johnson admitted that 'your paper contains
very considerable knowledge of history and of the constitution: it will
certainly raise your character, though perhaps it may not make you a
minister of state.' A copy to Pitt elicited the formal acceptance of
thanks, but the exclusion of the bill Boswell took as proof of his own
advocacy. He stood for Ayrshire, turning back from York when the
dissolution was announced. 'Our Boswell,' wrote the doctor to Langton,
'is now said to stand for some place. Whether to wish him success his
best friends hesitate.'
May found him with the Rambler for the last time. 'I intend,' he writes
to Dr Percy, 'to be in London about the end of this month, chiefly to
attend upon Dr Johnson with respectful affection. He has for some time
been very ill with dropsical asthmatical complaints, which at his age
are very alarming. I wish to publish as a regale to him a neat little
volume--_The Praises of Doctor Samuel Johnson, by co-temporary writers_.
Will your lordship take the trouble to send me a note of the writers who
have praised our much respected friend?' The attentive Bozzy had written
to all the leading men in the Edinburgh School of Medicine--Cullen,
Hope, Monro, and others. With the expectation that an increase of
Johnson's pension would enable him to visit Italy, he consulted Sir
Joshua Reynolds, and, with his approval, wrote to Thurlow the
Chancellor. At the house of the painter they dined for the last time.
'I accompanied him in Sir Joshua Reynolds's coach, to the entry
of Bolt Court. He asked me whether I would not go with him to
his house; I declined it, from an apprehension that my spirits
would sink. We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the
carriage. When he had got down upon the foot-pavement he called
out, "Fare you well;" and, without looking back, sprung away
with a kind of pathetick briskness, if I may use that
expression, which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal
uneasiness, and impressed me with a foreboding of our long,
long separation.'
We think of the dying Cervantes, and the student-admirer of the All
Famous and the Joy of the Muses--'parting at the Toledo bridge, he
turning aside to take the road to Segovia.'