Part 19

Had our travellers ridden the whole distance from Kingsburgh to Dunvegan they would have travelled a weary way in rounding Lochs Snizort and Grishinish. But they sent their horses by land to a point on the other shore of the further loch, and crossed over themselves in Macdonald of Kingsburgh’s boat. “When,” said Johnson, “we take into computation what we have saved and what we have gained by this agreeable sail, it is a great deal.” They had still some miles of dreary riding through the most melancholy of moorlands. There were no roads or even paths. “A guide,” writes Boswell, “explored the way, much in the same manner as, I suppose, is pursued in the wilds of America, by observing certain marks known only to the inhabitants.” In some places the ground was so boggy that it would not bear the weight of horse and rider, and they were forced to dismount and walk. [Sidenote: DUNVEGAN CASTLE.] It was late in the afternoon when they reached Dunvegan Castle—that hospitable home where Johnson “tasted lotus, and was in danger,” as he said, “of forgetting that he was ever to depart.” This ancient seat of the Macleods was less beautiful, but far more interesting as he saw it than it is at the present day. The barrenness of nature has been covered with a luxuriant growth, and the land all around “which presented nothing but wild, moorish, hilly, and craggy appearances,” is now finely wooded. But while the setting is so greatly improved, the ancient building which is enshrined has suffered beneath the hand of a restorer. It is true that some great improvements have been made. The wing which had so long been left unfinished, through a superstitious fear that the owner would not long outlive the completion—“this skeleton of a castle,” as Johnson describes it—has been completed. A fine approach has been formed from the side of the land. But in the alterations which were made about fifty years ago an architect was employed who must surely have acquired his mischievous art in erecting sham fortresses on the banks of the Clyde for the wealthy traders of Glasgow. It is greatly to be wished that a judicious earthquake would bring to the ground his pepper-box turrets. Nevertheless, in spite of all that he has done—and he did his worst,—it still remains a noble pile, nobly placed. It is built on the rocky shore of a small bay, and well sheltered from the violence of the waves by an island which lies across the mouth, and by headlands on both sides. Through narrow inlets are seen the open waters of Loch Follart, and beyond them the everlasting hills. We saw it on a fine summer evening, when the long seaweeds were swaying in the gentle heaving of the tiny waves. Outside the bay two yachts were furling their sails, for the morrow was the day of rest. The sea-birds were hovering and screaming all around. A great heron was standing on a rock, with his white breast reflected in the water. A little to the north a long mast was lying on the beach, washed up from a wreck which, black with seaweed, is discovered at low tide. The old castle, the finely wooded hills, the rocks covered with fern and heath, the clear reflections in the sea of the mountains across the loch, the island, the inlets, the white sails of the yachts, the tranquil beauty of the summer evening—all moved us deeply. One thing only was wanting. [Sidenote: RORIE MORE’S NURSE.] The delightful weather which the country had so long enjoyed had silenced “Rorie More’s Nurse.” There was not water enough in it to have caught that good knight’s ear; still less to have lulled him to sleep. Johnson had seen it “in full perfection.” It was “a noble cascade,” he said. But he paid dearly for the fineness of the sight; for during the whole of his stay the weather was dreary, with high winds and violent rain. “We filled up the time as we could,” he writes; “sometimes by talk, sometimes by reading. I have never wanted books in the Isle of Skye.” So comfortably was he situated that he could hardly be persuaded to move on. “Here we settled,” he writes, “and did not spoil the present hour with thoughts of departure.” When on Saturday Boswell proposed that they should leave on the following Monday, when their week would be completed, he replied: “No, Sir, I will not go before Wednesday. I will have some more of this good.”

[Sidenote: THE LAIRD OF MACLEOD.]

He was fortunate in his hosts. The Laird, a young man of nineteen, quickly won his friendship. He had been the pupil at University College, Oxford, of George Strahan, who had been known to Johnson from his childhood. Boswell describes Macleod as “a most promising youth, who with a noble spirit struggles with difficulties, and endeavours to preserve his people. He has been left with an incumbrance of forty thousand pounds debt, and annuities to the amount of thirteen hundred pounds a year. Dr. Johnson said, ‘If he gets the better of all this, he’ll be a hero; and I hope he will. I have not met with a young man who had more desire to learn, or who has learnt more. I have seen nobody that I wish more to do a kindness to than Macleod.’” According to Knox, who was an impartial witness, he was an excellent landlord. Distressed though he was by this heavy burthen of debt, “he raised no rents, turned out no tenants, used no man with severity, and in all respects, and under the most pressing exigences, maintained the character of a liberal and humane friend of mankind.”[639] He formed at one time the design of writing his own Life. Unhappily he left but a fragment. His father had died early, so that on the death of his grandfather, the year before Johnson’s visit, he had succeeded to the property—the estates in Skye, the nine inhabited isles and the islands uninhabited almost beyond number. “He did not know to within twenty square miles the extent of his territories in Skye.” But vast as these domains were, the revenue which they produced was but small. One estate of eighty thousand acres was only rented at six hundred pounds a year.

“His grandfather,” he writes, “had entered upon his inheritance in the most prosperous condition; but the course of his life was expensive, his temper convivial and hospitable, and he continued to impair his fortune till his death. He was the first of our family who was led to leave the patriarchal government of the clan, and to mix in the pursuits and ambition of the world. He had always been a most beneficent chieftain, but in the beginning of 1772, his necessities having lately induced him to raise his rents, he became much alarmed by the new spirit which had reached his clan. Aged and infirm he was unable to apply the remedy in person; he devolved the task on me, and gave me for an assistant our nearest male relation, Colonel Macleod, of Talisker. The estate was loaded with debt, encumbered with a numerous issue from himself and my father, and charged with some jointures. His tenants had lost in that severe winter above a third of their cattle.[640] My friend and I were empowered to grant such deductions in the rents as might seem reasonable; but we found it terrible to decide between the justice to creditors, the necessities of an ancient family, and the distresses of an impoverished tenantry. I called the people together; I laid before them the situation of our family; I acknowledged the hardships under which they laboured; I reminded them of the manner in which their ancestors had lived with mine; I combated their passion for America; I promised to live among them; I desired every district to point out some of their most respected men to settle with me every claim, and I promised to do everything for their relief which in reason I could. Our labour was not in vain. We gave considerable abatements in the rents; few emigrated; and the clan conceived the most lively attachment to me, which they most effectually manifested.

“I remained at home till the end of 1774, but I consider this as the most gloomy period of my life. Educated in a liberal manner, fired with ambition, fond of society, I found myself in confinement in a remote corner of the world; without any hope of extinguishing the debts of my family, or of ever emerging from poverty and obscurity. I had also the torment of seeing my mother and sisters immured with me.

“In 1774 [1773] Dr. Samuel Johnson, with his companion, Mr. Boswell, visited our dreary regions; it was my good fortune to be enabled to practise the virtue of hospitality on this occasion. The learned traveller spent a fortnight at Dunvegan; and indeed amply repaid our cares to please him by the most instructive and entertaining conversation. I procured for him the company of the most learned clergymen and sagacious inhabitants of the islands.”[641]

Macleod’s high praise of Johnson is in curious contradiction to Sir Walter Scott’s account, that “when winter-bound at Dunvegan, Johnson’s temper became most execrable, and beyond all endurance save that of his guide (Boswell).”[642] Mr. Croker, on receiving this account from Sir Walter, applied to the Laird’s son and successor, “who assured him emphatically they were all _delighted_ with him.”[643] Nevertheless, as I have already stated,[644] the young ladies of the family do not seem to have shared in this delight. The true Johnsonian must look upon them as “a set of wretched un-idea’d girls,” and so forgive their want of taste.

Macleod, two or three years after our traveller’s visit, raised a company of his own Highlanders, and entered the army. In the war against our colonists in America he and his wife, who had accompanied him, were taken prisoners. In their captivity they made the acquaintance and won the friendship of George Washington. Let us hope that the heart of the founder of the great American Commonwealth was softened towards the author of _Taxation no Tyranny_ by the anecdotes which he heard of him from his warm friend, the young Scottish chief. On his return home he raised the second battalion of the forty-second Highlanders, and served with distinction in India as their colonel. Zoffany painted him in his soldier’s dress, surrounded with elephants, camels, and Hindoos, with Highland scenery in the background. Just before he started for the East he dined at the house of one of his _tacksmen_, or chief tenants, “who said that all the dishes should be the produce of Macleod’s estate and the shores thereof. Amongst a profusion of other dishes there were thirteen different kinds of fish.”[645] He died in 1802 at the early age of forty-six.

[Sidenote: LADY MACLEOD.]

Fortunate as Johnson was in having this amiable and high-spirited youth for his host, scarcely less fortunate was he in his hostess, the Laird’s mother, Lady Macleod. The title which she bore was one of courtesy. Up to this time the wives of Highland lairds, and also of Scotch judges, seem commonly to have been addressed as _Lady_. Johnson’s hostess at Lochbuie, the wife of the laird, is called Lady Lochbuie by Boswell. The change to the modern usage had, however, begun; for Ramsay of Ochtertyre, speaking of the year 1769, says that, “Somebody asked Lord Auchinleck before his second marriage if the lady was to be called Mrs. Boswell, according to the modern fashion.”[646] Johnson was not wholly a stranger to his hostess. “I had once,” he writes, “attracted her notice in London.” She was able to render his stay pleasant, for from her long residence in England, “she knew all the arts of southern elegance, and all the modes of English economy.” In his talk she took great delight, though when one day she heard him maintain ““that no man was naturally good more than a wolf, and no woman either,” she said in a low voice, ‘This is worse than Swift.’” Knox, who visited Dunvegan in 1786 records the following anecdote:—

“Lady Macleod, who had repeatedly helped Dr. Johnson to sixteen dishes or upwards of tea, asked him if a small basin would not save him trouble, and be more agreeable. ‘I wonder, Madam,’ answered he roughly, ‘why all the ladies ask me such impertinent questions. It is to save yourselves trouble, Madam, and not me.’ The lady was silent and went on with her task.”[647]

It is not likely that Knox had the story at first hand, for when he visited Dunvegan, the Castle was occupied by a Major Alexander Macleod, who had married a daughter of Flora Macdonald. It is probable, therefore, that Lady Macleod was not living there at the time. The number of cups of tea may have grown as the story passed from one to another. We shall find in the next chapter that at Ulinish Johnson was reported to have exceeded even this feat in tea-drinking. Lady Eldon used to relate that one evening at Oxford she had helped him to fifteen. Cumberland, who was not famed for accuracy, did not go beyond a dozen as the number supplied to the great man by Mrs. Cumberland. Short even of this Johnson might very well “have turned his cup,” as he had done at Aberbrothick, and muttered, “_claudite jam rivos, pueri_.”

[Sidenote: THE OLD ROCK.]

Lady Macleod was discontented with the barrenness of Dunvegan, and longed to move the seat of the family to a spot about five miles off, “where she could make gardens and other ornaments. She insisted that the rock was very inconvenient; that there was no place near it where a good garden could be made; that it must always be a rude place; that it was a _Herculean_ labour to make a dinner here.” “I was vexed,” writes Boswell, “to find the alloy of modern refinement in a lady who had so much old family spirit. ‘Have all the comforts and conveniences of life upon it,’ I said, ‘but never leave Rorie More’s cascade.’ ‘It is very well for you,’ she replied, ‘who have a fine place, and everything easy, to talk thus, and think of chaining honest folks to a rock. You would not live upon it yourself.’ ‘Yes, Madam,’ said I, ‘I would live upon it, were I Laird of Macleod, and should be unhappy if I were not upon it.’ JOHNSON (with a strong voice and most determined manner). ‘Madam, rather than quit the old rock, Boswell would live in the pit; he would make his bed in the dungeon.’ The lady was puzzled a little. She still returned to her pretty farm—rich ground—fine garden. ‘Madam,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘were they in Asia, I would not leave the rock.’”

Her visitors were in the right. The scene was too noble a one to be lightly deserted. There was no need to go five miles for trees and gardens. [Sidenote: DR. JOHNSON’S PLANTATIONS.] The Scotch for their carelessness in adorning their homes did not here fall on deaf ears. His host and his host’s son planted largely, and the fruit of his advice and of their judicious labours is seen in the beautiful woods and shrubberies which surround the Castle. Rorie More’s Cascade is almost hidden by trees. A Dutch garden has been formed, where, under the shelter of the thick beech hedge which encloses it, the roses bloom. Close to the ruins of an ancient chapel, with glimpses through the trees of the waters of the Loch, a conservatory has been built. Had Johnson seen the beautiful and rare flowers which grow in it, he would surely never have maintained that “a green-house is a childish thing.” What a change has come since the day when he wrote that “the country about Dunvegan is rough and barren. There are no trees except in the orchard, which is a low, sheltered spot, surrounded with a wall.” The rough old fellow passed over the land with his strong common sense and his vigorous reproofs, and the rudeness of nature has been tamed, and its barrenness changed into luxuriance. He deserved better of mankind even than he “who made two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before;”[648] for he made trees and flowers to grow where before there had been none. He did that which a king of Scotland had tried to do and failed. James the Fifth’s command that round every house plantations should be made had resulted, I was told, in the few trees which Johnson saw. But where the king’s could be almost counted on the fingers of the two hands, Johnson’s cover whole hill-sides. I was informed by Miss Macleod, of Macleod, for whose kindness I am most grateful, that she had no doubt that it was his reproaches which stirred up her grandfather to plant so widely. How luxuriantly nature can deck the ground when she is aided by art, was seen in the strange variety of flowers which we noticed in the grounds. Two seasons seemed to be mingled into one, for we found at the same time wild roses, the hawthorn, blue bells, cuckoo flowers, heather, lupins, laburnums, and rhododendrons.

In ancient days the only access to the castle, says Sir Walter Scott, was “from the sea by a subterranean staircase, partly arched, partly cut in the rock, which winding up through the cliff opened into the court.”[649] These steps Johnson oddly describes as “a pair of stairs,” just as if they were in an Oxford college or the Temple. When the tide was up access was cut off, so that a visitor who had arrived by land must at the very end of his journey have taken boat in order to gain the entrance. A little above the lower gate, on the side of the passage, there was an old well, with uncovered mouth. At the christening of the present laird, one of the guests who had drunk too freely, going down the steps to his boat, fell in and was drowned. The well was at once enclosed, and has never been used since. Even in Johnson’s time its water, though not brackish in spite of its being so near to the sea, was not much used. The stream which formed Rorie More’s Cascade was thought to afford a purer supply. It was not by this staircase that our travellers entered the castle, but by a long flight of steps which the last laird had made on the side of the land. They were not guarded by hand-rails. Many years ago a milkmaid coming up them with her pails on a stormy day, was carried over by a high wind, and much hurt. They have given place to the present approach by a carriage-road carried over the chasm which cut off the castle from the neighbouring land.

[Sidenote: THE STATELY DINING-ROOM.]

On the walls of the “stately dining-room” where our travellers were first received, I saw hanging some fine portraits by Raeburn, their host and his wife and their eldest son, a lad with a sweet honest face, who was lost with his ship, the Royal Charlotte, in the Bay of Naples. Near them hang “the wicked laird” and his two wives. There is a tradition that his first wife had fled from him on account of his cruelty, but had been enticed back by a friendly letter. When her husband had caught her, he starved her to death in the dungeon. It was no doubt the sight of these pictures which one day at table led the company to talk of portraits; when Johnson maintained that “their chief excellence is being like. One would like,” he added, “to see how Rorie More looked. Truth, Sir, is of the greatest value in these things.”

In the same room stands a handsome old sideboard, bearing the date of 1603. Though it goes back to the year of the union of the two Crowns, yet of all the festive gatherings which it has witnessed, perhaps there is none that was more striking than that evening when the Highland gentlemen listened to Johnson’s “full strain of eloquence. We were,” writes Boswell, “a jovial company at supper. The laird, surrounded by so many of his clan, was to me a pleasing sight. They listened with wonder and pleasure while Dr. Johnson harangued.” [Sidenote: SIR WALTER SCOTT AT DUNVEGAN.] It was very likely in this same room that Sir Walter Scott breakfasted that August morning forty-one years later, “when he woke under the castle of Dunvegan. I had,” he writes, “sent a card to the laird of Macleod, who came off before we were dressed, and carried us to his castle to breakfast.”[650]

The noble drawing-room, with the deep recesses for the windows in walls nine feet thick, is not the one described by Boswell. The drawing-room which he saw “had formerly been,” he says, “the bed-chamber of Sir Roderick Macleod, and he chose it because behind it there was a cascade, the sound of which disposed him to sleep.” At the time of Sir Walter Scott’s visit it had again become a bed-room, for here he slept on a stormy night. [Sidenote: THE HAUNTED ROOM.] He had accepted, he says, “the courteous offer of the haunted apartment,” and this was the room which was given him. “An autumnal blast, sometimes clear, sometimes driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of the lake, which it occasionally concealed and by fits disclosed. The waves rushed in wild disorder on the shore, and covered with foam the steep pile of rocks, which rising from the sea in forms something resembling the human figure have obtained the name of Macleod’s Maidens. The voice of an angry cascade, termed the nurse of Rorie More, was heard from time to time mingling its notes with those of wind and wave. Such was the haunted room at Dunvegan; and as such it well deserved a less sleepy inhabitant.”[651] This account Sir Walter wrote many years later from memory. The rocks which he saw were not Macleod’s Maidens; from them he was separated by nearly ten miles of mountains and lochs.

[Sidenote: DUNVEGAN’S THREE TREASURES.]