Part 14

In the rebellion of 1745, Lord Errol, following a plan not unknown among the Scotch nobility, had served on the opposite side from his father. At Culloden he had seen him brought in prisoner. “The Earl of Kilmarnock had lost his hat, and his long hair was flying over his face. The son stepped out of the ranks, and taking off his own hat placed it over his father’s disordered and wind-beaten locks.”[538] The young man in his loyalty to George II., did not follow the example of his forefathers, for he was descended from at least three lines of rebels. “He united in his person the four earldoms of Errol, Kilmarnock, Linlithgow, and Callander.” The last two were attainted in 1715, and Kilmarnock in 1746.[539] As we gaze at the haughty-looking man whom Reynolds has so finely painted in the robes of a peer, we call to mind the coronation of George III., where he played his part as High Constable of Scotland—“the noblest figure I ever saw,” wrote Horace Walpole.[540] To Johnson he recalled Homer’s character of Sarpedon.[541] At the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, Walpole thought, as well he might, on that “most melancholy scene” which he had witnessed less than fifteen years before in that same hall, when the earl’s father, “tall and slender, his behaviour a most just mixture between dignity and submission,” had in vain pleaded for mercy.[542]

[Sidenote: THE BULLERS OF BUCHAN.]

From Slains Castle our travellers drove a short distance along the coast to the famous Bullers of Buchan—“a sight,” writes Johnson, “which no man can see with indifference, who has either sense of danger or delight in rarity.” Boswell describes the spot as:—

“A circular basin of large extent, surrounded with tremendous rocks. On the quarter next the sea, there is a high arch in the rock, which the force of the tempest has driven out. This place is called _Buchan’s Buller_, or the _Buller of Buchan_, and the country people call it the _Pot_. Mr. Boyd said it was so called from the French _bouloir_.[543] It may be more simply traced from _boiler_ in our own language. We walked round this monstrous cauldron. In some places the rock is very narrow; and on each side there is a sea deep enough for a man-of-war to ride in; so that it is somewhat horrid to move along. However, there is earth and grass upon the rock, and a kind of road marked out by the print of feet; so that one makes it out pretty safely: yet it alarmed me to see Dr. Johnson striding irregularly along.”

As the weather was calm they took a boat and rowed through the archway into the cauldron. “It was a place,” writes Johnson, “which, though we could not think ourselves in danger, we could scarcely survey without some recoil of mind.” He thought that “it might have served as a shelter from storms to the little vessels used by the northern rovers.” Sir Walter Scott, however, was told that this was impossible, for “in a high gale the waves rush in with incredible violence. An old fisher said he had seen them flying over the natural wall of the Bullers, which cannot be less than two hundred feet high.”[544] In the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1755 (p. 200), two strange pictures are given of this curious place, which must surely have been drawn in St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, by an artist who had never seen it.

[Sidenote: DUN BUY.]

Not far off is Dun Buy,[545] a lofty island rock placed in an angle of the shore that is formed by no less lofty cliffs. The sea, with its dark waters in endless rise and fall, washes through the narrow channel, its ceaseless murmur answering to the cries of the countless water-fowl who high up on the ledges breed in safety. On one side, where there is a steep, grassy slope, Dun Buy can be scaled. I climbed up it many years ago one hot summer’s day, and thought that I had never seen so strange and wild a spot. Johnson had also visited it, but his mind was not affected as was my young imagination, for he said that “upon these rocks there was nothing that could long detain attention.”

BANFF AND ELGIN (AUGUST 25-26).

Starting from Slains Castle on the morning of August 25, Boswell and Johnson drove on to Banff, where they spent the night in an indifferent inn. In this little town a dreadful sight had been witnessed when the Duke of Cumberland’s army arrived on an early day in April, 1746. The savage way in which the narrative is written, testifies to the ferocity of many of the followers of “the butcher duke.”

“At Banff” (writes Ray) “two rebel spies were taken; the one was knotching on a stick the number of our forces, for which he was hanged on a tree in the town; and the other a little out of town, and for want of a tree was hanged on what they call the ridging-tree of a house that projected out from the end, and on his breast was fixed in writing, _A Rebel Spy_, which, with the addition of _good entertainment_, might have been a very famous sign.”[546]

From Banff our travellers drove on to Elgin, passing through Lord Findlater’s domain. It is strange that neither of them mentions the passage of the Spey, which ofttimes was a matter of great difficulty and even danger. Wesley describes it as “the most rapid river, next the Rhine, he had ever seen.”[547] It was no doubt very low, owing to “that long continuance of dry weather which,” as Johnson complained a few days later, “divested the Fall of Foyers of its dignity and terror.” At Elgin they dined, and dined badly. “It was,” he said, “the first time he had seen a dinner in Scotland that he could not eat.” [Sidenote: THE RED LION AT ELGIN.] He might have reasonably expected something better, for in the account of Scotch inns given in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1771 (p. 544), the Red Lion at Elgin, kept by Leslie, is described as good. It is added that “he is the only landlord in Scotland who wears ruffles.” As this was the inn in which the civic feasts were always held, the honour not only of the landlord, but also of the town was wounded by the publication of Johnson’s narrative. I am glad to be able to inform the world that a satisfactory explanation has been given, and that Elgin and the Red Lion were not guilty of the inhospitality with which they have so long been reproached, and so unjustly. It seems that for some years before Johnson’s visit a commercial traveller, Thomas Paufer by name, used in his rounds to come to this inn.

“He cared little about eating, but liked the more exhilarating system of drinking. His means were limited, and he was in the habit of ordering only a very slender dinner, that he might spend the more in the pleasures of the bottle. This traveller bore a very striking resemblance to Dr. Johnson. When the doctor arrived at the inn, the waiter, by a hasty glance, mistook him for Paufer, and such a dinner was prepared as Paufer was wont to receive. The doctor suffered by the mistake, for he did not ask for that which was to follow. Thus the good name of Elgin suffered, through the mistaking of the person of the ponderous lexicographer. This fact is well known, and is authenticated by some of the oldest and most respectable citizens of the town.”[548]

[Sidenote: AN ELGIN FUNERAL BILL.]

Mr. Paufer’s means must have been indeed limited, for unless prices had greatly risen in the previous thirty years, a good dinner and wine could have been provided at a most moderate charge, to judge by the following entries in an Elgin “funeral bill,” dated Sept 26, 1742:—

“One dozen strong old claret (bottles being returned) 14_s._ 0_d._ 4 lb. 12 oz. of sugar 3_s._ 4_d._ five dozen eggs 5_d._ six hens 2_s._ 0_d._”[549]

One pound of sugar, it will be noticed, cost as much as two hens, and a little more than eight dozen eggs. With sugar at such a price it must have given a shock to a careful Scotch housewife to see well-sweetened lemonade flung out of the window merely because a waiter had used his dirty fingers to drop in the lumps.

To Johnson Elgin seemed “a place of little trade and thinly inhabited.” Yet Defoe, writing only fifty years earlier, had said: “As the country is rich and pleasant, so here are a great many rich inhabitants, and in the town of Elgin in particular, for the gentlemen, as if this was the Edinburgh or the Court for this part of the island, leave their Highland habitations in the winter, and come and live here for the diversion of the place and plenty of provisions.”[550]

[Sidenote: THE PIAZZAS IN ELGIN.]

Much of its ancient prosperity has returned to it. If it cannot boast of being a court for the north, it is at all events a pleasant little market-town that shows no sign of decay. The covered ways which in many places ran on each side of the street have disappeared. “Probably,” writes Boswell, “it had piazzas all along the town, as I have seen at Bologna. I approved much of such structures in a town, on account of their conveniency in wet weather. Dr. Johnson disapproved of them, ‘because,’ said he, ‘it makes the under story of a house very dark, which greatly overbalances the conveniency, when it is considered how small a part of the year it rains; how few are usually in the street at such times; that many who are might as well be at home; and the little that people suffer, supposing them to be as much wet as they commonly are in walking a street.’” “They were a grand place for the boys to play at marbles,” said an old man to me, who well remembered the past glories of Elgin and the delights of his youth. Even at the time of our travellers’ visit, they were frequently broken by houses built in the modern fashion. In many cases they have not been destroyed, but converted into small shops. “There are,” writes a local antiquary, “some fine old piazzas in the High Street which have been whitewashed over and hidden.” He suggests that some of these might be restored to the light of day.[551] It would be a worthy deed for the citizens, even in one spot, to bring back the former appearance of their ancient town.

[Sidenote: CATHEDRALS IN RUINS.]

The noble ruins of the great cathedral Johnson examined with a most patient attention, though the rain was falling fast. “They afforded him another proof of the waste of reformation.” His indignation was excited even more than by the ruins at St. Andrew’s; for “the cathedral was not destroyed by the tumultuous violence of Knox, but suffered to dilapidate by deliberate robbery and frigid indifference.” By an order of Council the lead had been stripped off the roof and shipped to be sold in Holland. “I hope,” adds Johnson, “every reader will rejoice that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea.” On this passage Horace Walpole remarks in a letter to Lord Hailes:—“I confess I have not quite so heinous an idea of sacrilege as Dr. Johnson. Of all kinds of robbery that appears to me the lightest species which injures nobody. Dr. Johnson is so pious, that in his journey to your country he flatters himself that all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church. I doubt that uncharitable anathema is more in the spirit of the Old Testament than of the New.”[552] While Johnson censured the frigid indifference of the Scotch, he did not forget the ruin that was being slowly worked in England by the avarice and neglect of deans and canons. “Let us not,” he wrote, “make too much haste to despise our neighbours. Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation. It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence, and we are in danger of doing that deliberately which the Scots did not do but in the unsettled state of an imperfect constitution.” He had learnt, there seems good reason to believe, that the chapter of the cathedral of his own town of Lichfield intended to strip the lead off its roof and cover it instead with slate. As he had first printed his narrative he had much more closely pointed the attack. It had run as follows: “There is now, as I have heard, a body of men not less decent or virtuous than the Scottish council, longing to melt the lead of an English cathedral. What they shall melt, it were just that they should swallow.” Before publication he had the leaf cancelled, from the tender recollection that the dean had done him a kindness about forty years before. “He is now very old, and I am not young. Reproach can do him no good, and in myself I know not whether it is zeal or wantonness.”[553]

As I turned away from the ruins with my thoughts full of the past—of the ancient glory of the cathedral, of the strange sights which had been seen from its tower when the Young Pretender’s Highlanders hurried by, closely followed by the English army, of old Johnson wandering about in the heavy rain—I was suddenly reminded of the vastness of “the abysm of time” by which they are separated from us, by reading in an advertisement placarded on the walls, that for £3 16_s._ 5_d._ could be had a ticket from Elgin to Paris and back.

NAIRN AND CAWDOR (AUGUST 27-28).

[Sidenote: THE ROYAL BURGH OF NAIRN.]

Leaving Elgin that same afternoon, our travellers drove on to Fores, where they passed the night. Next morning, continuing their journey early, they breakfasted at Nairn. “Though a county town and a royal burgh, it is,” writes Boswell, “a miserable place.” Johnson also describes it as being “in a state of miserable decay.” Nevertheless, “the chief annual magistrate,” he says, “is styled Lord Provost.” If it sank as a royal burgh, it has raised its head again as a popular bathing-place. In this respect it has not its rival, I was told, in the north of Scotland. Here Johnson “fixed the verge of the Highlands; for here he first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse language.”[554] Over the room in the inn where he and Boswell sat “a girl was spinning wool with a great wheel, and singing an Erse song.” It was thirty years later that Wordsworth in like manner heard “The Solitary Reaper”:

“Yon solitary Highland lass Reaping and singing by herself.”

Even so far back as the reign of James VI. both languages were spoken in Nairn. “It was one of that king’s witticisms to boast that in Scotland he had a town ‘sae lang that the folk at the tae end couldna understand the tongue spoken at the tother.’”[555] Gaelic is no longer heard in its streets. The verge of the Higher lands must now be fixed farther to the west. Nine years before Johnson’s visit the little town had been stirred up by Wesley. On Monday, June 11, 1764, he recorded in his journal: “While we were dining at Nairn, the innkeeper said, ‘Sir, the gentlemen of the town have read the little book you gave me on Saturday, and would be glad if you would please give them a sermon.’ Upon my consenting, the bell was immediately rung, and the congregation was quickly in the kirk.”[556]

[Sidenote: CAWDOR MANSE.]

From Nairn our travellers turned a few miles out of their course to visit the Rev. Kenneth Macaulay in his manse at Cawdor. To Johnson he was known by his _History of St. Kilda_—“a very pretty piece of topography” as he called it to the author, “who did not seem much to mind the compliment.” To us he is interesting as the great-uncle of Lord Macaulay. “From his conversation,” says Boswell, “Dr. Johnson was convinced that he had not written the book which goes under his name. ‘There is a combination in it’ (he said) ‘of which Macaulay is not capable.’” “To those who happen to have read the work,” writes Sir George Trevelyan, “Johnson’s decision will give a very poor notion of my ancestor’s abilities.”[557] Let him take comfort. The present minister of Cawdor, to whose civility I am indebted, told me that in the Kirk Session Records is a minute by Macaulay “most beautifully expressed.” I had hoped to sit in the very parlour where Johnson had reproached him with being “a bigot to laxness,” and where he had given his little son a Sallust, promising at the same time to get him a servitorship at Oxford when he was ready for the University. But hopes that are based on the permanence of buildings are often disappointed. Of the old manse nothing remains. The minister, who rejoiced in having a more comfortable home than his predecessors, refused to share in my sentimental regrets. The situation seemed a pleasant one, as I saw it on a fine evening in July, with the sun setting behind the hills on the other side of the Moray Firth. The haymakers were busy at their work close to the house, in a field which is bounded on one side by a deep hollow, with a little brook flowing at the bottom, and in front by a row of old ash trees.

[Sidenote: TALK IN CAWDOR MANSE.]

In the company of Macaulay Boswell “had dreaded that a whole evening would be heavy. However,” he adds, “Mr. Grant, an intelligent and well-bred minister in the neighbourhood, was there, and assisted us by his conversation.” His grandson is Colonel Grant, who shares with Captain Speke the glory of having discovered the sources of the Nile. It was indeed an unusual gathering that August evening in the parlour of the quiet manse—Johnson, the first of talkers, Boswell, the first of biographers, the great-uncle of our famous historian, and the grandfather of our famous discoverer. My hopes rose high when I was told that a diary which Mr. Grant kept was still in existence. Of this evening’s talk some record surely would have been made. With sorrow I learnt from his grandson that “accounts of expenses, sermons preached, peat-cutting, stipends, washing _twice a year_, births, &c., are the principal things which are mentioned.” This washing twice a year must not be taken as a proof that this divine “had no passion for clean linen.” A Scotch friend of mine remembers a man who owned three farms in the neighbourhood of Campbeltown. In his house they only washed twice a year, though both he and his three sons who lived with him changed their shirts every second day. A time was chosen when there was a slackness in the ordinary work, and then the female servants were gathered from the three farms for a week’s hard washing. This same custom exists, I believe, to the present day in Norway. [Sidenote: CAWDOR CHURCH.] In the churchyard I found Mr. Grant’s tombstone. He lived till 1828—fifty-five years after he had met Johnson. He used to tell a story about the doctor which happily has been preserved. He had supped with him, as we learn from Boswell, at the inn at Inverness. Johnson, who was in high spirits, gave an account of the kangaroo, which had lately been discovered in New South Wales, “and volunteered an imitation of the animal. The company stared; Mr. Grant said nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man like Dr. Johnson standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.”[558]

[Sidenote: PENANCE-RING, CAWDOR CHURCH.]

Near Mr. Grant lies his friend and predecessor Kenneth Macaulay, with an inscription which tells that he was “notus in fratres animi paterni.” This _animus paternus_ descended in full measure to Lord Macaulay. On the porch of the church is still fastened by an iron chain the old penance-ring which Pennant saw one hundred and twenty years ago. “Observed,” he writes, “on a pillar of the door of Calder church a _joug_, _i.e._, an iron yoke or ring, fastened to a chain; which was in former times put round the necks of delinquents against the rules of the Church, who were left there exposed to shame during the time of divine service, and was also used as a punishment for defamation, small thefts, &c., but these penalties are now happily abolished.”[559] From such penance as this there was perhaps an escape for those who were well-to-do. From _Hudibras_ we learn that the Presbyterian saints could “sentence to stools or poundage of repentance,” which passage is explained by the commentator as “doing penance in the Scotch way, upon the stool of repentance, or commuting the penance for a sum of money.”[560]

[Sidenote: CAWDOR CASTLE.]

“By the direction of Mr. Macaulay,” writes Johnson, “we visited Cawdor Castle, from which Macbeth drew his second title.” That they should have needed a direction to visit so beautiful a spot seems strange, for they must have passed close by it on their way to the manse. As I first caught sight of it by the light of a summer evening, I thought that I had rarely seen a fairer spot. This castle hath indeed a pleasant seat, I said. All the barrenness of the eastern coast I had left behind me, and had found in its stead a luxuriance of growth that would have graced the oldest mansion in England. Everything seemed beautiful, and everything harmonious—the ancient castle, with its high-pitched roof and its lofty tower; the swift-flowing river, with its bridge of a single arch; the curve in the road where it crosses it; the avenue of lofty trees, the lawns enclosed by limes, the shrubberies, and the range of mountains in the distance still showing the light of the sun which had set for us. The water murmured pleasantly, and a gentle breeze rustled the leaves. I found a little inn close by the park gate, where homely fare and decent lodging are provided. A man of a quiet meditative mind might pass a few days there pleasantly enough if he sought shelter in the woods on the afternoons when the castle is thrown open to visitors. Next morning I watched the school-children, bare-footed, but clean and tidy, carrying on their arms their slates covered with sums in neat figures, trooping merrily by, and winding over the bridge on their way to school. By the kindness of the Earl of Cawdor I was allowed to go over the castle from turret almost to foundation-stone at a time when it was not generally open.

“The old tower,” says Boswell, “must be of great antiquity. There is a draw-bridge—what has been a moat—and an ancient court. There is a hawthorn-tree, which rises like a wooden pillar through the rooms of the castle; for, by a strange conceit, the walls have been built round it. The thickness of the walls, the small slanting windows, and a great iron door at the entrance on the second story as you ascend the stairs, all indicate the rude times in which this castle was erected. There were here some large venerable trees.”