Part 25

Boswell hesitated, or affected to hesitate, about calling on the Duke of Argyle. “I had reason to think,” he writes, “that the duchess disliked me on account of my zeal in the Douglas cause; but the duke had always been pleased to treat me with great civility.” The duchess was that famous beauty, Elizabeth Gunning, the wife of two dukes and the mother of four. Her sister had married the Earl of Coventry. “The two beautiful sisters,” says Horace Walpole, “were going on the stage, when they are at once exalted almost as high as they could be, were countessed and double-duchessed.”[718] The duchess, by her first husband, the Duke of Hamilton, was the mother of the unsuccessful competitor for the Douglas estates, and was therefore “prejudiced against Boswell, who had shown all the bustling importance of his character in the Douglas cause.”[719] Johnson, on hearing the state of the case, “was clear that Boswell ought to pay his respects at the castle. I mentioned,” continues Boswell, “that I was afraid my company might be disagreeable to the duchess. He treated the objection with a manly disdain, ‘_That_, Sir, he must settle with his wife.’ He insisted that I should not go to the castle this day before dinner, as it would look like seeking an invitation. ‘But,’ said I, ‘if the duke invites us to dine with him to-morrow, shall we accept?’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ I think he said, ‘to be sure.’ But he added, ‘He won’t ask us.’” By the duke, who was sitting over his wine, Boswell was most politely received; but when he was taken into the drawing-room and introduced, neither the duchess nor the ladies with her took the least notice of him. The following day he and Johnson were shown through the castle. “It is a stately place,” said Johnson. “What I admire here is the total defiance of expense.” In a low one-horse chair our two travellers were driven through “the duke’s spacious park and rising forests.” [Sidenote: FINE OLD TREES AT INVERARY.] “I had,” writes Boswell, “a particular pride in showing Dr. Johnson a great number of fine old trees, to compensate for the nakedness which had made such an impression on him on the eastern coast of Scotland.” Pennant noticed pines nine feet, and beeches from nine to twelve feet in girth, planted, it was said, by the Earl of Argyle who was beheaded in 1685. They have grown to a noble size, and in one part form a long avenue, which would grace that English county which takes its name from its beech woods. Even in the Black Forest I do not know that I have seen larger pines. The planting still goes on. A fine young Spanish chestnut boasts in the inscription which it bears that in the year 1858 it was planted by Lord Tennyson. “Would,” I exclaimed as I read the words, “that twin chestnuts of stately growth in like manner commemorated the visit of Johnson and Boswell.” But Johnson’s trees are scattered broadcast over Scotland. _Si monumentum quæris, circumspice._

[Sidenote: TWO BEAUTIFUL SISTERS.]

The fine collection of arms of which he took much notice still adorns the hall. Of the pictures no mention is made by either of the travellers, though in more than one they might have recognized the work of their friend Sir Joshua. Here is his full-length portrait of the beautiful duchess, “about whom the world had gone mad” one-and-twenty years before. When she was presented at Court, “the crowd was so great,” writes Horace Walpole, “that even the noble mob in the drawing-room clambered upon chairs and tables to look at her.” As she passed down to Scotland, “seven hundred people,” it was reported, “sat up all night in and about an inn in Yorkshire to see her get into her post-chaise next morning.”[720] Here, too, is a small but lovely picture of her sister, the Countess of Coventry. On her going down to her husband’s country seat near Worcester, “a shoemaker in that town got two guineas and a half by showing a shoe that he was making for her at a penny a-piece.”[721] In striking contrast with the two sisters are many of the portraits which hang on the walls. It is a strange company which is brought together: Mary, Queen of Scots, and her half-sister, a Countess of Argyle; Oliver Cromwell; the Marquis of Argyle, and just below him Charles II., who sent him to the scaffold; the earl, his son, who was beheaded by James II.; and John, the great duke, who broke the neck of the rebellion in 1715, and rendered desperate the cause of James II.’s son.

[Sidenote: DINNER AT INVERARY.]

The room in which our travellers dined is much in the state in which they saw it; the walls panelled with the same festoons, and the chairs adorned with the same gilding and the same tapestry. But it is turned to other uses. No “splendid dinner” is served up in it such as Johnson enjoyed and praised; no “luxuries” such as he defended. No Lady Betty Hamilton can quietly take her chair after dinner, and lean upon the back of it, as she listens eagerly to the great talker, who is unaware that she is just behind him. No Boswell can with a steady countenance have the satisfaction for once to look a duchess in the face, as with a respectful air he drinks to her good health. The tables are covered with books and magazines, and pamphlets, and correspondence. It is the duke’s business-room where he sees his chamberlain,[722] and where his librarian receives and sorts the new publications which are ever coming in, before he transfers them to the shelves of the library.

The noble drawing-room remains unchanged—the gilded ceiling, the old French tapestry covering the walls, the gilt tapestry chairs, the oaken floor, up and down which the duke and Boswell walked conversing, while her grace made Dr. Johnson come and sit by her. All is the same, except that time has dealt kindly by the tapestry and the gilding, and refined them in their fading.

Faujas Saint-Fond, who spent three days in the castle a few years later, is full of praise of everything which he saw. The duke and his family, he says, spoke French with a purity not unworthy of the highest society in Paris. The cookery, with the exception of a few dishes, was French, and was excellent. There was an abundance of hot-house fruits. There were silver forks instead of “ces petits tridens d’acier bien aigus, en forme de dard, fixés sur un manche, dont on se sert ordinairement en Angleterre, même dans les maisons où l’on donne de fort bons dîners.”[723] Still more did he rejoice at seeing napkins on the table, a rare sight in England. The hours of meals were, breakfast at ten o’clock, dinner at half-past four, and supper at ten. At dinner, after the ladies had withdrawn, “la cérémonie des _toasts_” lasted at least three-quarters of an hour![724]

[Sidenote: LORD MACAULAY’S GRANDFATHER.]

At Inverary Johnson met not only the descendants of a long line of famous statesmen, but also the ancestor of a great historian. Lord Macaulay’s grandfather was at this time Minister of Inverary. He passed the evening with our travellers at their inn after they had returned from dining at the Castle, and got somewhat roughly handled in talk.

“When Dr. Johnson spoke of people whose principles were good, but whose practice was faulty, Mr. Macaulay said, he had no notion of people being in earnest in their good professions, whose practice was not suitable to them. The doctor grew warm, and said, ‘Sir, are you so grossly ignorant of human nature, as not to know that a man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice?’”

On this Sir George Trevelyan remarks in his life of his uncle:—“When we think what well-known ground this was to Lord Macaulay it is impossible to suppress a wish that the great talker had been at hand to avenge his grandfather and grand-uncle.”[725] “A hundred to one on Sam Johnson,” say we. It is a pity that it was not at the Manse that they spent that Sunday evening; for there the little child who was one day to make the name of Zachary Macaulay famous as the liberator of the slaves would have gazed with eager open eyes on the great Englishman, who had startled the grave men at Oxford by giving as his toast:—“Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West-Indies.”

GLENCROE, LOCH LOMOND, AND GLASGOW (OCTOBER 26-30).

The Duke of Argyle, who had heard Dr. Johnson complain that the shelties were too small for his weight, “was obliging enough to mount him on a stately steed from his Grace’s stable.” Joseph (Boswell’s servant), said:—“He now looks like a bishop.” Leaving Inverary on the morning of Tuesday, October 26, they rode round the head of Loch Fyne through Glencroe to Tarbet on Loch Lomond. Boswell, who was becoming somewhat indolent in keeping his journal, passes over this part of their tour in silence. Saint-Fond speaks of the Glen as “ce triste passage.” Pennant describes it as “the seat of melancholy,” and Johnson as “a black and dreary region. At the top of the hill,” he adds, “is a seat with this inscription, ‘Rest and be thankful.’ Stones were placed to mark the distances, which the inhabitants have taken away, resolved, they said, to have no new miles.” The road was that at which Wolfe’s men had been working twenty years earlier.

[Sidenote: “REST AND BE THANKFUL.”]

“He that has gained at length the wished for height,” still finds as Wordsworth many years later found “this brief, this simple wayside call,” _Rest and be Thankful_; but there is no longer a seat where his weary limbs may repose. Perhaps some day it will be restored with the old inscription and the following addition:—“James Wolfe, 1753. Samuel Johnson, 1773. William Wordsworth, 1831.” It is on a mile-stone, or on what looks like a mile-stone, that the inscription is now read. Beneath is carved.

MILITARY ROAD REPD. BY 93D REGT. 1768. TRANSFERRED TO COMMRS FOR H. R. & B.[726] IN THE YEAR 1814.

One of the earlier tablets, which were believed to have been put up by Wolfe’s men, was pulled down many years ago by a farmer at Ardvoirlich, and transformed into a hearth stone.[727] Glencroe is but little changed since Johnson looked upon it. It is still lonely and grand. The tourist’s carriage breaks the quiet from time to time, but it soon sinks back into “sublimity, silence and solitude.” When we passed through it there was no succession of cataracts and no roaring torrent such as Johnson described. The long drought had made a silence in the hills. We met only one tourist—a lad on his bicycle who had escaped that morning from the smoke of Glasgow, and full of eagerness and life, was pressing on to the inn where his long ride of fifty miles would find its pleasant termination in dinner and a bed. I called to mind how seven and thirty years before when I was just such another youngster, as I was crossing the top of the Glen, I had seen in the distance something white fluttering in the wind. It was a big Highlander returning, as he told us, from Glasgow. Overcome by the heat of the day, and incommoded by a garment to which he was not much accustomed, he had taken off his trousers and was carrying them on his shoulders. It was his shirt that had caught my eye.

[Sidenote: A JUDGE ON CIRCUIT.]

At Tarbet our travellers dined at the little inn on the bank of Loch Lomond. Here, a few years later, Saint-Fond and his party arrived very late on a rainy night in September. They were on their way from Glasgow to Inverary, and had meant to rest at Luss. Unfortunately for them it was the time of the autumn circuit. The inn looked like a fisherman’s hut. The landlady coming out made them a sign that they must not utter a sound. They were thrust into a stable, where she said:—“Le lord juge me fait l’honorable faveur dans sa tournée de loger chez moi; il est là; chacun doit respecter ce qu’il fait; il dort.” She added that she could take in neither them nor their horses. They remonstrated, “Point de bruit, ne troublez pas le sommeil du juge, respect à la loi; soyez heureux et partez.” They had no help for it, but drove on with their weary horses through the night and the heavy rain to Tarbet, where they arrived between three and four next morning. There they found all the beds occupied by jurymen, who were on their way to Inverary. The landlady did what she could to make them comfortable, and gave them some good tea in a set of China cups which had been given her by the Duchess of Argyle.[728]

[Sidenote: LORD JEFFREY AT TARBET.]

At Stuckgown, close to Tarbet, Lord Jeffrey for many years passed a few weeks of every summer, in a quietness and solitude which have for ever fled the place. Writing from Tarbet on August 5, 1818, he says: “Here we are in a little inn on the banks of Loch Lomond, in the midst of the mists of the mountains, the lakes, heaths, rocks, and cascades which have been my passion since I was a boy, and to which, like a boy, I have run away the instant I could get my hands clear of law, and review, and Edinburgh. They have no post-horses in the Highlands, and we sent away those that brought us here, with orders to come back for us to morrow, and so we are left without a servant, entirely at the mercy of the natives.” He goes on to mention a steam-boat “which circumnavigates the whole lake every day in about ten hours. It was certainly very strange and striking to hear and see it hissing and roaring past the headlands of our little bay, foaming and spouting like an angry whale; but on the whole it rather vulgarises the scene too much, and I am glad that it is found not to answer, and is to be dropped next year.”[729] At Tarbet the tourist who is oppressed with the size of the hotel and the army of waiters, and who sees the pier as I saw it crowned with an automatic sweetmeat machine, may well wish that the steam-boat had never been found to answer. The scene is hopelessly vulgarised. It is fast sinking into the paradise of cockneys. I asked for that variety of bread which I remember to have seen served up there thirty-seven years ago. I was scornfully told that in those days the Scotch had not known how to bake, but that now they could make a large loaf as well as anyone. At Inverary I had in vain asked for oat-cakes at my hotel. If Johnson were to make his journey in these present times, and were confined to the big tourists’ hotels, he would certainly no longer say that an epicure, wherever he had supped, would wish to breakfast in Scotland.

[Sidenote: THE COLQUHOUNS OF ROSEDEW.]

From Tarbet he rode along the shores of Loch Lomond to Rosedew,[730] the house of Sir James Colquhoun. “It was a place,” says the historian of Dumbartonshire, “rich in historic associations, but about 1770 it was superseded by a new mansion, to which large additions have since been made.”[731] Here Boswell passed in review Johnson’s courteous behaviour at Inverary, and said, “‘You were quite a fine gentleman when with the duchess.’ He answered in good humour, ‘Sir, I look upon myself as a very polite man.’” Next morning “we took,” writes Johnson, “a boat to rove upon the lake. It has about thirty islands, of which twenty belong to Sir James. Young Colquhoun[732] went into the boat with us, but a little agitation of the water frighted him to shore. We passed up and down and landed upon one small island,[733] on which are the ruins of a castle; and upon another much larger, which serves Sir James for a park, and is remarkable for a large wood of yew trees.” Just one hundred years later, on December 18, 1873, that very fate befell one of his descendants which the young Colquhoun dreaded for himself. In the darkness of a winter’s evening his boat was upset as he was coming home from the Yew Island, and he was drowned with three of his gamekeepers and a boy. It was never known how the accident happened, for no one escaped; but the boat was heavily laden with the dead bodies of some stags, which they had shot in the island, and the unhappy men were weighed down with their accoutrements and the ammunition which they carried. The yew trees were planted, it was said, on the advice of King Robert Bruce, in order to furnish the Lennox men with trusty bows.[734] The old castle, “on which the osprey built her annual nest,” is so much buried in ivy that it is not easily distinguished from the surrounding woods. [Sidenote: ROVING ON LOCH LOMOND.] We hired a boat at Luss and in our turn roved upon the lake. We landed on one of the islands and lunched on the top of a rock by the ruins of a second castle. Loch Lomond, studded with islands, lay like a mirror beneath us, with the huge Ben Lomond for a noble background. From time to time a boat broke the smoothness of the water, and the cry of a gull, or the bark of a far-away dog, the stillness of the air. We spoke of the heat and bustle of the world, but imagination almost refused to picture them in so peaceful a spot. Our boatman was a man of a strong mind, which had not been suffered to lie barren. He bore his part well in a talk on books. I had chanced to mention the serfs who worked in the coal-mines and salt-pans in Scotland; he at once struck into the conversation. “Sir Walter Scott,” he said, “makes one of his characters say, ‘he would not take him back like a collier on a salter.’ This made me look the matter up for I did not understand what he meant.” [Sidenote: OLD AND NEW DOMINIES.] He praised the old Scotch common schools. “We Scotchmen,” he proudly said, “have had education for three hundred years. A Scotch working-man would starve to death to give his son a good education.” The present race of schoolmasters who are “paid by results,” he contrasted unfavourably with those whom he had known in his boyhood. “The old Dominies would willingly teach all that they knew, and grudged no time to a boy who was eager for knowledge; but now they are like other people, and when they have done their day’s work they will do no more.” In the village club to which he belonged, they had in the last two or three winters engaged for a few weeks a young Glasgow student to teach them elocution, “for how could they enjoy Shakespeare if they did not know how to read him properly?” He praised the Colquhouns. “They would never send any of their tenants to prison for poaching. They might fine them, but the money they would give away in charity.” He spoke of the old clan feeling, and of the protection given by the laird. His grandfather, who was a farmer, a Macpherson by name, had married a Macqueen.[735] On a rapid fall in the price of Highland cattle he fell into money difficulties, and was harshly threatened with a forced sale by one of his creditors. The Laird of the Macqueens said significantly to this man: “You may do whatever you like against Macpherson, but remember that his wife is a Macqueen.” The hint was enough, and the proceedings were at once dropped. Our boatman had read Johnson’s _Journey to the Western Islands_, but said that Scotchmen feel too sore about him to like reading him. I opened the book, for I had it with me, and read the concluding words in which he says: “Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little.” My boatman was much struck with his modesty, and seemed to think that he had formed too severe a judgment.

Boswell was not so careful in recording Johnson’s talk on the Lake as I was with our boatman’s. “I recollect,” he writes, “none of his conversation, except that, when talking of dress, he said, ‘Sir, were I to have any thing fine, it should be very fine. Were I to wear a ring, it should not be a bauble, but a stone of great value. Were I to wear a laced or embroidered waistcoat, it should be very rich. I had once a very rich laced waistcoat, which I wore the first night of my tragedy.’” Johnson, nearly five and twenty years before, sat in one of the side-boxes of Drury Lane Theatre, in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich gold lace, and a gold-laced hat, listening to the catcalls whistling before the curtain rose; how little could he have thought that one day he would boast of his costume as he was roving in a boat upon Loch Lomond!

[Sidenote: COMMISSARY SMOLLETT.]

In the evening they drove to Cameron, the seat of Commissary Smollett. It was the first drive which they had taken since at Inverness they began their _equitation_ full two months earlier. “Our satisfaction,” says Boswell, “of [_sic_] finding ourselves again in a comfortable carriage was very great. We had a pleasing conviction of the commodiousness of civilisation, and heartily laughed at the ravings of those absurd visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the superior advantages of a _state of nature_.” With these visionaries Boswell himself sometimes sided. The people of Otaheite especially had won his admiration. “No, Sir;” said Johnson to him on one such occasion: “You are not to talk such paradox; let me have no more on’t. It cannot entertain, far less can it instruct.” “Don’t cant in defence of savages,” he said, on another occasion. At Cameron they had none of this fanciful talk. Their host “was a man of considerable learning, with abundance of animal spirits; so that he was a very good companion for Dr. Johnson, who said, ‘We have had more solid talk here than at any place where we have been.’” He was a relation of the great novelist, and one of the four judges of the Commissary Court in Edinburgh. It was the sole court in Scotland which took cognisance of actions about marriage, and the Supreme Court in all questions of probate. “It sat,” says the lively Topham, “in a little room of about ten feet square; from the darkness and dirtiness of it you would rather imagine that those who were brought into it were confined there.” The judges were paid rather by perquisites than by salaries. In each cause they fixed the amount which the litigants should pay them for the sentence which they pronounced.[736]

[Sidenote: TOBIAS SMOLLETT.]

Smollett, in his _Humphry Clinker_, brings Matthew Bramble and his nephew to Cameron, who describe it as “a very neat country house, but so embosomed in an oak wood that we did not see it till we were within fifty yards of the door.” “If I was disposed to be critical,” Mr. Bramble continues, “I should say it is too near the Lake, which approaches on one side to within six or seven yards of the window.”[737] The Commissary had erected a pillar by the side of the high road to Glasgow, “to the memory of his ingenious kinsman,” who two years earlier had died in Italy, “Eheu! quam procul a patria!” The Latin inscription for this monument was shown to Johnson, and revised by him “with an ardent and liberal earnestness.” The copy with the corrections in his handwriting is preserved among the family papers at Cameron.[738]