Part 12

Every Scotchman, it was said long ago, thought it his duty once in his life to visit “the city of the scarlet gown” and to see the ruins of the great cathedral.[487] No longer, happily, is the mind of the pilgrim “filled with mournful images and ineffectual wishes;” no longer does he see “a University pining in decay and struggling for life;” no longer does he wander through grass-grown streets, listening to the sound of his own solitary steps. The town is thriving and animated; the University sees the number of its students steadily increasing. It had long been depressed by poverty; but a noble endowment happily has this very year[488] fallen to its lot. If it can never hope to attain to those stately avenues and lawns and gardens and buildings, as beautiful as they are venerable, which are the boast of Oxford, nevertheless in the bracing pureness of its air, in its fine situation on the shores of the northern sea, in its seclusion from that bustle which distracts the student’s life, and from that luxury which too often makes poverty, however honest, hang its head, it has advantages which are not enjoyed by any other of our Universities.

LEUCHARS AND ABERBROTHICK. (AUGUST 20).

[Sidenote: LEUCHARS CHURCH.]

Johnson, closing his description of St. Andrews with his lament over its declining University, goes on to say like a wise man:—“As we knew sorrow and wishes to be vain, it was now our business to mind our way.” Perhaps, as he wrote these words he had in his memory two lines of Matthew Green, though they were originally used of quitting, not what was painful, but what was pleasant—

“Though pleased to see the dolphins play, I mind my compass and my way.”[489]

He and Boswell started about noon for Montrose on the other side of the Firth of Tay, a distance of a little over forty miles, but with good reason made a halt at Leuchars, on observing the fine old Norman church.[490] They were fortunate enough to see it before it was “restored” for nothing ancient remains but the apse and chancel. The new portion in the interior is ugly in the most approved Scottish fashion; in the outside it would be insignificant were it not added as a vast excrescence to the ancient building. It stands on a little hill at the end of the village, with the churchyard round it falling away on the southern side in steep slopes to the road. Hard by are some well-grown trees round the Manse where Boswell waited on the aged minister, a very civil old man, to learn what he could. He was told that the church was supposed to have stood eight hundred years. St. Andrews certainly can show nothing so ancient. The village is built solidly enough of stone, but seems careless of pleasing the eye. There are no little gardens before the houses, no roses trained up the walls, scarcely any flowers in the windows. “Take care of the beautiful, the useful will take care of itself” has not been a gospel sounded in Scottish ears.

The road to the Tay, which Boswell enlivened by leading Johnson to discuss the doctrine of transubstantiation, lay through a pleasant undulating country that bears luxuriant crops and at the present time is no longer wanting in trees. Their chaise was taken across the Firth in a ferry-boat at a charge of four shillings. How Johnson, who always delighted in what he called “the accommodations of life,” would have exulted in the great bridge which now spans the flood! He would have noticed too with pleasure the long avenue of young trees planted along the bank. [Sidenote: ABERBROTHICK.] Passing through Dundee, “a dirty despicable town” as he describes it, but now the seat of a vast commerce, they came about the close of the day to the ruined abbey of Aberbrothick.[491] The sight of these fragments of “stupendous magnificence” struck Johnson perhaps more than anything which he saw on the whole of his tour. “I should scarcely have regretted my journey,” he said, “had it afforded nothing more than the sight of Aberbrothick.” John Wesley declared that he “knew nothing like the Abbey in all North Britain. I paced it and found it an hundred yards long. The breadth is proportionable. Part of the west-end which is still standing shows it was full as high as Westminster Abbey.”[492] It had been left in much the same state of neglect as the Cathedral of St. Andrews. Boswell, “whose inquisitiveness was seconded by great activity,” wanted to climb one of the towers. “He scrambled in at a high window, but found the stairs within broken, and could not reach the top.” The entrance to the other tower they could not discern, and as the night was gathering upon them he gave up the attempt. Not clearly remembering Johnson’s account, I told the old man who shows the Abbey that I had read in an old book that a hundred years and more ago the staircase was broken down. “Then they _leed_,” he answered angrily, indignant for its reputation for antiquity. I learnt from him that an ancient inn, which had been recently pulled down, had been found to have been built of the hewn stones taken from the Abbey. In the ruins no doubt for many a long year the town had had its quarry. Johnson noticed one room of which he could not conjecture the use, “as its elevation was very disproportionate to its area.” [Sidenote: THE CHAPTER HOUSE.] I was told that it was the Chapter House, but my informant, a queer little urchin who acted as under-guide, was not trustworthy, for he informed me that the ruins had been caused by a fire in which the Abbey was burnt down a thousand years ago. In this room I found hanging on the wall likenesses of Mary Queen of Scots and of Pope Pius IX. Surely the bitterness of the Reformation has passed away even in Scotland.

[Sidenote: RUINS AND ADVERTISEMENTS.]

The grounds are still used as a graveyard. Here and elsewhere in Scotland I noticed in the inscriptions that the English term _wife_ is slowly supplanting the old Scotch term _spouse_. On one side of the great gateway two ugly arches have been lately built as entrances to pompous family burial places. These excrescences should surely be removed and the dead left to their quiet insignificance. On the outside, underneath a lofty wall, a pleasant bowling-green has been laid out for public enjoyment, with flower borders running round. The town was keeping a public holiday the day I was there, and the ground was thronged with players and spectators. I was sorry to see in many places that ivy in the true cockney spirit has been trained up the ruins. Unless the strong sea-breezes, which cut off the tops of the trees as soon as they show their heads too high, come to the rescue, it will in time hide the dark red sandstone beneath a uniform mantle of green. Though the ruins are now cared for, and the ground cleared of the long grass and weeds which hindered Johnson from tracing the foundations, nevertheless the lofty wall close to the main entrance is disgraced by huge advertisements. As the stranger approaches the venerable pile from the High Street he gives one angry thought to the Town Council which leases it to the dealers in sewing machines, in blue, and in Irish whisky for advertising their wares. “Where there is yet shame there may in time be virtue.” Would that this protest of mine may rouse a feeling of shame in the unworthy guardians of so glorious a ruin!

MONTROSE, LAURENCEKIRK AND MONBODDO (AUGUST 20-21).

[Sidenote: MONTROSE.]

The road along which Johnson and Boswell drove as they journeyed from Dundee through Arbroath to Montrose, is described by Defoe as a “pleasant way through a country fruitful and bespangled, as the sky in a clear night with stars of the biggest magnitude, with gentlemen’s houses, thick as they can be supposed to stand with pleasure and conveniency.”[493] Our travellers in the latter part of the drive saw nothing of all this, for the sun had set before they left the great Abbey; it was not till eleven at night that they arrived at Montrose. There they found but a sorry inn, where, writes Boswell, “I myself saw another waiter put a lump of sugar with his fingers into Dr. Johnson’s lemonade, for which he called him ‘rascal!’ It put me in great glee that our landlord was an Englishman. I rallied the Doctor upon this and he grew quiet.” The town Johnson praised as “neat”—“neat” last century stood very high among the terms of commendation, though it is now supplanted by “elegant” among Americans, and by “nice” among English people. At the time of the Rebellion of 1745, the townsfolk had been described as “very genteel, but disaffected.”[494] To the clerk of the English chapel Johnson gave “a shilling extraordinary, saying, ‘He belongs to an honest church.’” He had the great merit also of keeping his church “clean to a degree unknown in any other part of Scotland,” so that his shilling was well earned.

From Montrose the road led through a country rich with an abundant harvest that was almost ripe for the sickle, but bare of everything but crops. Even the hedges, said Johnson, were of stone. Boswell calls this a ludicrous description, but it could have been easily defended as good Scotch, for in the _Scots Magazine_ for January of the previous year, we read of “the stone hedges of Scotland.”[495] It is strange that Johnson had not noticed these roughly-built walls in Northumberland, for in the northern part of that county, according to Pennant, “hedges were still in their infancy.”[496] [Sidenote: LAURENCEKIRK.] At Laurencekirk our travellers stopped to dine, and “respectfully remembered that great grammarian Ruddiman,” who had spent four years there as schoolmaster. More than seventy years before their visit, Dr. Pitcairne, the author of that Latin epitaph on Dundee which Dryden translated, being weather-bound at the village inn, “inquired if there were no persons who could interchange conversation and partake of his dinner.” The hostess mentioned Ruddiman. He came, pleased Pitcairne, and was by him brought to Edinburgh.[497] [Sidenote: A VILLAGE LIBRARY.] Francis Garden, one of the Scotch judges, under the title of Lord Gardenston, the laird and almost the founder of this thriving village, “had furnished the inn with a collection of books, that travellers might have entertainment for the mind as well as the body. Dr. Johnson praised the design, but wished there had been more books, and those better chosen.” The inn still stands with the library adjoining it. Round the room is hanging a series of portraits in French chalk of Gardenston’s “feuars,” or tenants, who, after the laird, were the chief people of the place when Johnson and Boswell passed through. Many of the books remain on the shelves, though some have been lost through carelessness or the dishonesty of travellers. There are among them a few works of light literature such as Dryden’s _Virgil_, and _Gil Blas_ in French, but the solid reading which most of them afford makes us think with a feeling of respect that almost amounts to awe, of the learning of the Scotch travellers in those good old days. Tavern chairs were no thrones of human felicity in Laurencekirk if such works as the following were commonly perused by those who chanced to fill them:

Magno’s _Observations on Anatomy_, in Latin. Keill’s _Introduction to the Study of Astronomy_. _Aristophanes_, with Latin notes. Boerhaave’s _Commentaries on the Aphorisms of Diseases, naturalized into English_. Tull’s _Horse-hoeing Husbandry_. Watt’s _Logic_. Newton’s _Principia_. Clarke’s _Sermons_. _Machiavelli_, in Italian.[498]

In Marischal College, Aberdeen, there is a portrait of Lord Gardenston in his judge’s robes. He has a somewhat conceited look, such as we might expect in a man who “wrote a pamphlet upon his village, as if he had founded Thebes,” and who provided such improving reading for his weary fellow-creatures.

[Sidenote: LORD MONBODDO.]

A mile or two off the road from Laurencekirk to Aberdeen lived the famous old Scotch judge, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. “I knew,” wrote Boswell, “that he and Dr. Johnson did not love each other; yet I was unwilling not to visit his Lordship, and was also curious to see them together. I mentioned my doubts to Dr. Johnson, who said he would go two miles out of his way to see Lord Monboddo.” The two men had not much in common except their love of learning, and their precision of speech. Monboddo, according to Foote, was an Elzevir edition of Johnson. In a letter to Mrs. Thrale Johnson thus describes him:

“He has lately written a strange book about the origin of language, in which he traces monkeys up to men, and says that in some countries the human species have tails like other beasts. He inquired for these long-tailed men of Banks, and was not well-pleased that they had not been found in all his peregrinations. He talked nothing of this to me, and I hope we parted friends; for we agreed pretty well, only we disputed in adjusting the claims of merit between a shopkeeper of London and a savage of the American wildernesses. Our opinions were, I think, maintained on both sides without full conviction; Monboddo declared boldly for the savage, and I perhaps for that reason sided with the citizen.”

Johnson a few years earlier had contrasted Monboddo with Rousseau, “who talked nonsense so well that he must know he was talking nonsense;” whereas, he added, “chuckling and laughing, ‘I am afraid Monboddo does not know that he is talking nonsense.’” He was undoubtedly a man of great learning, but he was almost destitute of the critical faculty. In the six volumes of his _Ancient Metaphysics_ we come across such strange passages as the following:

“Not only are there tailed men extant, but men such as the ancients describe Satyrs have been found, who had not only tails, but the feet of goats, and horns on their heads.... We have the authority of a father of the Church for a greater singularity of the human form, and that is of men without heads but with eyes in their breasts.... There is another singularity as great or greater than any I have hitherto mentioned, and that is of men with the heads of dogs.”[499]

After stating his readiness to believe that “a tame and gentle animal” once existed, “having the head of a man and the body of a lion,” he continues:

“The variety of nature is so great that I am convinced of the truth of what Aristotle says, that everything exists, or did at some time exist, which is possible to exist.”[500]

The orang-outang he describes as being “of a character mild and gentle, affectionate, too, and capable of friendship, with the sense also of what is decent and becoming.”[501] The ancients, he stoutly maintained, were in every respect better and stronger than their descendants. He shocked Hannah More by telling her that “he loved slavery upon principle.” When she asked him “how he could vindicate such an enormity, he owned it was because Plutarch justified it.”[502] In one respect he was wise in following the example of the ancients. In an age when bathing was very uncommon even among the wealthy, he constantly urged the daily use of the cold bath. He reminded “our fine gentlemen and ladies that the Otaheite man, Omai, who came from a country where the inhabitants bathed twice a day,” complained of the offensive smell of all the people of England.[503] It was believed, however, that Monboddo impaired the health of his children by the hardy treatment to which he exposed them. He despised Johnson because “he had compiled a dictionary of a barbarous language, a work which a man of real genius rather than undertake would choose to die of hunger.”[504] In the latter part of his life he used every year to pay a visit to London, and he always went on horseback, even after he had passed his eightieth year. “A carriage, a vehicle that was not in common use among the ancients, he considered as an engine of effeminacy and sloth. To be dragged at the tail of horses seemed in his eyes to be a ludicrous degradation of the genuine dignity of human nature. In Court he never sat on the Bench with the other judges, but within the Bar, on the seat appropriated for Peers.”[505] Yet with all his singularities he was a fine old fellow. There was no kinder landlord in all Scotland. While around him the small farms were disappearing, and farmers and cottagers were making room for sheep, it was his boast that on his estate no change had been made. Neither he nor his father before him had ever turned off a single cottager.

“One of my tenants (he wrote) who pays me no more than £30 of rent has no less than thirteen cottagers living upon his farm. I have on one part of my estate seven tenants, each of whom possesses no more than three acres of arable land, and some moorish land for pasture, and they pay me no more than twelve shillings for each acre, and nothing for the moor. I am persuaded I could more than double the rent of their land by letting it off to one tenant; but I should be sorry to increase my rent by depopulating any part of the country; and I keep these small tenants as a monument of the way in which I believe a great part of the Lowlands was cultivated in ancient times.”[506]

He befriended Burns, who repaid his kindness by celebrating his daughter’s beauty in his _Address to Edinburgh_, and by the elegy which he wrote on her untimely death. In a note to _Guy Mannering_ Sir Walter Scott describes his supper parties, “where there was a circulation of excellent Bordeaux in flasks garlanded with roses, which were also strewed on the table after the manner of Horace. The best society, whether in respect of rank or literary distinction, was always to be found in St. John’s Street, Canongate. The conversation of the excellent old man; his high, gentleman-like, chivalrous spirit; the learning and wit with which he defended his fanciful paradoxes; the kind and liberal spirit of his hospitality, must render these _noctes cænæque_ dear to all who, like the author (though then young), had the honour of sitting at his board.”

[Sidenote: MONBODDO HOUSE.]

Boswell’s man-servant, who had been sent on to ascertain whether Lord Monboddo was at home, awaited the travellers’ arrival at the turn in the road, with the news that they were expected to dinner.

“We drove,” says Boswell, “over a wild moor. It rained, and the scene was somewhat dreary. Dr. Johnson repeated with solemn emphasis Macbeth’s speech on meeting the witches.... Monboddo is a wretched place, wild and naked, with a poor old house; though, if I recollect right, there are two turrets, which mark an old baron’s residence. Lord Monboddo received us at his gate most courteously, pointed to the Douglas arms upon his house, and told us that his great-grandmother was of that family.”

The old arms are still above the door, with the inscription:

“R. I. E. D. 1635.”

“R. I.” was Robert Irvine, a colonel in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, and possibly the superior officer of Major Dugald Dalgetty. “E. D.” was Elizabeth Douglas. Their daughter married one of the Burnetts, of Crathes Castle. There is nothing wretched, wild, or naked about Monboddo in the present day. As I saw it, no thought of a “blasted heath,” and of Macbeth’s witches could by any freak of the imagination have entered the mind. The land all round has been brought into cultivation, and there is no moor within five miles. The road along which I drove was bordered by a row of beech trees, which might have been planted by Lord Monboddo or his father. The ancient part of the house, which remains much as Boswell saw it, though large additions have been made, so far from striking one as poor and wretched, has a picturesque, old-fashioned look of decent comfort. Close to it stand a holly and a yew, which have seen the lapse of more centuries than one. The lawns are wide and soft, and very pleasant. Hard by a brook prattles along, almost hidden by rhododendrons and firs. The distant view of the Grampians; the pure, bracing air, whether the wind blows it from the sea on the east or from the mountains on the west; the lawns, the trees, the old house, picturesque in itself, and interesting in its associations, render Monboddo a most pleasant abode. In the time of the old judge it was no doubt bare enough. Where there are now lawns and flower-beds there most likely corn and turnips grew, for he was almost as fond of farming as he was of the ancients. When he received our travellers, “he was dressed,” says Boswell, “in a rustic suit, and wore a little round hat. He told us we now saw him as _Farmer Burnett_, and we should have his family dinner—a farmer’s dinner. He produced a very long stalk of corn as a specimen of his crop, and said, ‘You see here the _lætas segetes_.’” An instance of his “agricultural enthusiasm” used to be recounted by Sir Walter Scott: “Returning home one night after an absence (I think) on circuit, he went out with a candle to look at a field of turnips, then a novelty in Scotland.”[507] He had a glimpse, it should seem, of some of the wonders which chemistry was soon to work in agriculture, for being one day at Court, he told George III. that the time would come when a man would be able to carry in his waistcoat pocket manure enough for an acre of land.[508]

The “farmer’s dinner” was good enough to satisfy Dr. Johnson, for he made a very hearty meal. Yet with all the pride of a man who has a vigorous appetite, he said, “I have done greater feats with my knife than this.” The low, square, panelled room in which they dined is much as they saw it, with its three windows with deep recesses looking on to the lawns and trees. It is a solid, comfortable apartment, which might have recalled to Johnson’s memory an Oxford Common-Room, and which harmonized well with the solid talk he had with his host. In it there is a curious clock, so old that it might have told the hours to Colonel Irvine and his wife Elizabeth Douglas, and have attracted Johnson’s notice by its antiquity.

ABERDEEN (AUGUST 21-24).