Part 26

On Thursday, October 28, a postchaise which Boswell had ordered from Glasgow, “came for us,” he says, “and we drove on in high spirits.” On their way they stopped at Dunbarton, then “a small but good old town, consisting principally of one large street in the form of a crescent;”[739] but now a smoky seat of the iron ship-building industry. The steep rock on which the Castle stands Johnson “ascended with alacrity.” [Sidenote: THE “SARACEN’S HEAD,” GLASGOW.] At Glasgow they stayed at the “Saracen’s Head,” “the paragon of inns in the eyes of the Scotch,” says a writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, “but most wretchedly managed.”[740] Our two travellers seem to have been contented. Johnson, no doubt, was kept in the best of humours by the sight of a great many letters from England, after the long interval of sixty-eight days during which not a line had reached him. “He enjoyed in imagination the comforts which we could now command, and seemed to be in high glee. I remember, he put a leg up on each side of the grate, and said, with a mock solemnity, by way of soliloquy, but loud enough for me to hear it: ‘Here am I, an ENGLISH man, sitting by a _coal_ fire.’” Of fires made by peat, that “sullen fuel,” he had had enough in the last two months. All along the sea-board coal was made artificially dear by the folly of Parliament. A duty of five shillings and fourpence per chaldron, says Knox, was levied on coal at ports; none on inland coal. It had to be landed at a port where there is a custom-house, and might then be re-shipped for some other place in the neighbourhood.[741] Custom-houses were few and far between, so that in many cases, if coal was used at all, it would have had to be twice landed and twice shipped. On this mischievous regulation Adam Smith remarks: “Where coals are naturally cheap they are consumed duty free; where they are naturally dear, they are loaded with a heavy duty.”[742]

The “Saracen’s Head” with its coal fire has disappeared. My boatman had heard the old people talk of it. In this inn the following morning Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two of the other professors of the University breakfasted with Johnson. He met some of them also at dinner, tea, and supper. “I was not much pleased with any of them,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale. Boswell unfortunately was again lazy with his journal, and kept no record of the talk. [Sidenote: THE GLASGOW PROFESSORS.] Writing long afterwards, he says: “The general impression upon my memory is, that we had not much conversation at Glasgow, where the professors, like their brethren at Aberdeen, did not venture to expose themselves much to the battery of cannon which they knew might play upon them.” Reid’s silence was perhaps merely due to that reserve which he generally shewed among strangers.[743] Had fate been kinder, the great Clow might have been still among them, who twenty-two years before had been preferred both to Hume and Burke as Adam Smith’s successor in the Chair of Logic.[744] The story of the Billingsgate altercation between Smith and Johnson, recorded by Sir Walter Scott, is wholly untrue. Smith was not at this time in Glasgow. It is, no doubt, one of those tales about Johnson in which Scotch invention was humorously displayed. It was, perhaps, meant as a reply to the question which one day, in London, he put to Adam Smith, who was boasting of Glasgow, “Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?” Boswell says: “I put him in mind of it to-day while he expressed his admiration of the elegant buildings, and whispered him, ‘Don’t you feel some remorse?’” Smith’s pride in the city where he had spent more than three years as a student, and twelve as a professor, was assuredly well-founded. Johnson calls it “opulent and handsome,” and Boswell “beautiful.” [Sidenote: GLASGOW IN DAYS OF OLD.] Nearly two centuries earlier Camden had said that “for pleasant situation, apple-trees, and other like fruit-trees, it is much commended.”[745] Defoe describes it as “indeed a very fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together. It is the cleanest, and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.”[746] Another traveller of about the same date says that “it is the beautifullest little city he had seen in Britain. It stands deliciously on the banks of the River Clyde.”[747] In June, 1757, John Wesley went up to the top of the cathedral steeple. “It gave us a fine prospect,” he writes, “both of the city and the adjacent country. A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in England.”[748] Smollett swells the general chorus of praise: “Glasgow is the pride of Scotland. It is one of the prettiest towns in Europe.”[749] Pennant, who visited it the year before Johnson, calls it “the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw. The view from the Cross has an air of vast magnificence.”[750]

At the Rebellion of 1745 the citizens had shown the greatest loyalty. They raised and supported at their own expense two battalions of six hundred men each, who joined the duke’s army. Their town was occupied by the Pretender’s forces, who for ten days lived there at free quarters. They had had to pay, moreover, two heavy fines, amounting to more than nine thousand pounds, imposed on them for their fidelity to the Hanoverian Family. In 1749, in answer to their petition for relief, they received a grant from Parliament of ten thousand pounds.[751] On April 24 of that same year a stage-coach began to run between Glasgow and Edinburgh, starting from Edinburgh every Monday and Thursday, and from Glasgow every Tuesday and Friday. “Every person pays nine shillings fare, and is allowed a stone-weight of luggage.”[752] By the year 1783 far greater facilities were afforded. In John Tait’s _Directory for Glasgow_ of that year (p. 77) it is announced that “three machines set out from each town every day at eight morning. They stop on the road and change horses. Tickets, 10_s._ 6_d._ each.” There was another daily “machine” belonging to a different set of proprietors, besides one which ran only three times a week, and charged but 8_s._ 6_d._ “The Carlisle Diligence,” it is announced, “sets out every lawful day.”

As we gaze on the filthy river which runs by the large city, on the dense cloud of smoke which hangs over it, on the grimy streets which have swallowed up the country far and wide, while we exult in the display of man’s ingenuity and strength, and in the commerce by which the good things of earth are so swiftly and cheaply interchanged, we may mourn over the beautiful little town among the apple-trees which stood so deliciously on the banks of the fair and pure stream that ran to seawards beneath the arches of the old stone bridge. How far removed from us are those days when Glasgow was pillaged by the wild rabble of Highlanders! Yet I have an uncle[753] still living who remembers his grandfather and his grandfather’s brother, one of whom had climbed up a tree to see the other march with a body of Worcestershire volunteers against the Young Pretender.

Johnson, after seeing the sights of the city, visited the college. “It has not had,” he writes, “a sufficient share of the increasing magnificence of the place.” From the account which Dr. Alexander Carlyle gives of the citizens, as he had known them about thirty years earlier, they were not likely to trouble themselves much about the glory of their University. With a few exceptions they were “shopkeepers and mechanics, or successful pedlars, who occupied large warerooms full of manufactures of all sorts to furnish a cargo to Virginia. In those accomplishments and that taste that belong to people of opulence, much more to persons of education, they were far behind the citizens of Edinburgh.” There was not a teacher of French or of music in the whole town. [Sidenote: GLASGOW UNIVERSITY.] Nevertheless, in the University itself he found “learning an object of more importance, and the habit of application much more general” than in the rival institution in the capital.[754] Wesley compared the two squares which formed the college with the small quadrangles of Lincoln College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow, and did not think them larger, or at all handsomer. He was surprised at the dress of the students. “They wear scarlet gowns, reaching only to their knees. Most I saw were very dirty, some very ragged, and all of very coarse cloth.”[755] How much more surprised would he have been at the far shorter gowns now worn by the commoners in his own university, showing, as they do, a raggedness which is not the effect of age and wear, but of intentional mutilation! There is an affectation of antiquity quite as much in a freshman’s gown, as in the pedigree of some upstart who boasts that he is sprung from the Plantagenets. The college numbered at this time about four hundred students, most of whom lived in lodgings, but some boarded with the professors.[756]

[Sidenote: PRINCIPAL LEECHMAN.]

The principal was Dr. Leechman, whose sermon on prayer had once raised a storm “among the high-flying clergy.”[757]

“In his house Dr. Johnson had the satisfaction of being told that his name had been gratefully celebrated in one of the parochial congregations in the Highlands, as the person to whose influence it was chiefly owing that the New Testament was allowed to be translated into the Erse language. It seems some political members of the Society in Scotland for propagating Christian Knowledge had opposed this pious undertaking, as tending to preserve the distinction between the Highlanders and Lowlanders.”

Johnson, in a letter full of generous indignation, had maintained that “he that voluntarily continues ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces,” and had compared these political Christians to the planters of America, “a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.”[758] Though he was no doubt struck by Leechman’s appearance, “which was that of an ascetic, reduced by fasting and prayer,” yet in his talk he could have had no pleasure. “He was not able to carry on common conversation, and when he spoke at all, it was a short lecture.” The young students who were invited to his house, longed to be summoned from the library to tea in the drawing-room, where his wife “maintained a continued conversation on plays, novels, poetry, and the fashions.”[759]

DUNDONALD CASTLE, AUCHANS (OCTOBER 30—NOVEMBER 2).

[Sidenote: THE ROAD TO AUCHINLECK.]

On Saturday, October 30, our travellers set out on their way to Boswell’s home at Auchinleck, in Ayrshire. Part of the way must have been over a wild country, for a few years earlier, in his “Instructions” for his friend Temple on his tour to Auchinleck, he writes: “Set out [from Glasgow] for Kingswell, to which you have a good road; arrived there, get a guide to put you through the muir to Loudoun.”[760] He and Johnson did not go the whole distance in one day, though they had but thirty-four miles to travel. They broke their journey at the house of Mr. Campbell, of Treesbank, who had married Mrs. Boswell’s sister. Here they rested till Tuesday. At a few miles distance Robert Burns, a lad of thirteen, “a dexterous ploughman for his age,” was spending his boyhood “in unceasing moil” and hardship, not having as yet “committed the sin of rhyme.” Boswell, I believe, much as he admired Allan Ramsay’s poem in the Scottish dialect, _The Gentle Shepherd_, never makes mention of Burns, and Burns only once mentions him. In the _Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer_, written before the year 1786, he says:

“Alas! I’m but a nameless wight, Trode i’ the mire an’ out o’ sight! But could I like Montgomeries fight, Or gab[761] like Boswell, There’s some sark-necks[762] I wad draw tight, An’ tie some hose well.”

[Sidenote: “KING BOB’S” CASTLE.]

Dundonald Castle, in which Robert II. lived and died, our travellers visited on Monday morning. “It has long been unroofed,” writes Boswell, “and though of considerable size we could not by any power of imagination, figure it as having been a suitable habitation for majesty. Dr. Johnson, to irritate my _old Scottish_ enthusiasm, was very jocular on the homely accommodation of “King _Bob_,” and roared and laughed till the ruins echoed.”

The castle belongs to two periods. The original keep was eighty-one feet long, forty broad, and seventy high. It was afterwards lengthened at the southern end by seventeen feet. “The great hall has been a very noble apartment.”[763] Boswell justly praises the view. “It stands,” he says, “on a beautiful rising ground, which is seen at a great distance on several quarters, and from whence there is an extensive prospect of the rich district of Cunninghame, the western sea, the isle of Arran, and a part of the northern coast of Ireland.” Camden quaintly says that “the name _Cunninghame_, if one interpret it, is as much as the _Kings Habitation_, by which a man may guess how commodious and pleasant it is.”[764] As I sat on the Castle hill, and looked over the fine country to the north-west, I could have wished that the tall chimneys of Irvine, pouring forth clouds of smoke, had been out of sight. In the plain, at the distance of about a mile, a thin line of steam showed where a heavy train was creeping along the railway. Just beneath us the low spire of the church rose among the trees, while in the gardens of the cottages that clustered around it there was an abundance of fruit trees and of vegetables which would have delighted Johnson’s heart, such as “King Bob” never saw or even dreamt of. Beyond the village were undulating fields of well-cultivated land. To the west, almost within bow-shot, stands a steep rocky hill—a counterpart of that on which the castle is placed—all covered with wood. High over the old ruins the swifts were flying and screaming. The sole tenants of the great hall were some black cattle whom my entrance disturbed. Where kings once kept their court, and frowned and were flattered,

“There but houseless cattle go To shield them from the storm.”

High up on the wall of the keep there are two stone shields, on which still can be traced the royal and the Stewart arms. Little did they who carved them think that the day was to come when they would have sunk into the ornaments of a cow-house.

[Sidenote: THE COUNTESS OF EGLINTOUNE.]

From Dundonald our travellers rode on a short distance to Auchans, the house of the Dowager Countess of Eglintoune. Johnson, in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, describes her as “a lady who for many years gave the laws of elegance to Scotland. She is in full vigour of mind, and not much impaired in form. She is only eighty-three. She was remarking that her marriage was in the year eight; and I told her my birth was in nine. ‘Then,’ says she, ‘I am just old enough to be your mother, and I will take you for my son.’ She called Boswell the boy. ‘Yes, Madam,’ said I, ‘we will send him to school.’ ‘He is already,’ said she, ‘in a good school;’ and expressed her hope of his improvement. At last night came, and I was sorry to leave her.” “She had been,” writes Boswell, “the admiration of the gay circles of life, and the patroness of poets.” To her Allan Ramsay had dedicated his _Gentle Shepherd_, and Hamilton of Bangour had addressed verses. With his reception Johnson was delighted, so congenial were their principles in church and state. “In her bed-rooms,” says Dr. Robert Chambers, “was hung a portrait of her sovereign _de jure_, the ill-starred Charles Edward, so situated as to be the first object which met her sight on awaking in the morning.”[765] She who had patronised poets and worshipped princes in her last years amused herself by taming rats. “She had a panel in the oak wainscot of her dining-room, which she tapped upon and opened at meal-times, when ten or twelve jolly rats came tripping forth and joined her at table.” She died in 1780, at the age of ninety-one.[766]

[Sidenote: OLD AUCHANS.]

Auchans—Old Auchans as it is now called—since the countess’s death has been chiefly inhabited by caretakers. It was built in 1644, at a time when in the houses of the great comfort was more studied than means of defence. Nevertheless “we find some shot-holes near the entrance doorway.”[767] It is finely placed among the trees, with views of Dundonald Castle on one side and of the sea in the distance on the other. The interior has been greatly altered by the division of rooms and blocking up of windows and passages. We were only shown a small part of it, and looked with sadness on the broken ceiling in what by tradition is known as the dining-room. It is a pity that so interesting and so fine a building should have suffered under the neglect of a whole century. It is so strongly built that it looks as if it could, at no excessive expense, be once more made habitable. Johnson had not been easily persuaded to visit it, but “he was so much pleased with his entertainment, that he owned,” says Boswell, “that I had done well to force him out.” No less pleased was the old countess, “who, when they were going away, embraced him, saying, ‘My dear son, farewell.’” Neither of this visit nor of one which he had paid two days earlier to the Earl of Loudoun, who “jumped for joy” at the thought of seeing him, does he make any mention in his book. He was the last man to indulge “in that vain ostentatious importance,” which he censured in many people, “of quoting the authority of dukes and lords.” He merely says that, “on our way from Glasgow to Auchinleck we found several places remarkable enough in themselves, but already described by those who viewed them at more leisure, or with much more skill.”

AUCHINLECK (NOVEMBER 2-8).

[Sidenote: LORD AUCHINLECK.]

On Tuesday, November 2, our travellers having ordered a chaise from Kilmarnock, drove to Auchinleck, where they arrived in time for dinner. “We purpose,” wrote Johnson that same evening, “to stay here some days, more or fewer, as we are used.” He said “we” advisedly, for he knew that not only between Lord Auchinleck and himself there was little in common, but that also between the father and son there was no freedom of intercourse. “My father,” Boswell once complained, “cannot bear that his son should talk with him as a man.”[768] How uncomfortable was his position at home is shown by a letter which he wrote to his friend the Rev. Mr. Temple in September, 1775:

“I came to Auchinleck on Monday last, and I have patiently lived at it till Saturday evening.... It is hardly credible how difficult it is for a man of my sensibility to support existence in the family where I now am. My father, whom I really both respect and affectionate (if that is a word, for it is a different feeling from that which is expressed by _love_, which I can say of you from my soul), is so different from me. We _divaricate_ so much, as Dr. Johnson said, that I am often hurt when, I dare say, he means no harm: and he has a method of treating me which makes me feel myself 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. His wife too, whom in my conscience I cannot condemn for any capital bad quality, is so narrow-minded, and, I don’t know how, so set upon keeping him under her own management, and so suspicious and so sourishly tempered that it requires the utmost exertion of practical philosophy to keep myself quiet. I however have done so all this week to admiration: nay, I have appeared good-humoured; but it has cost me drinking a considerable quantity of strong beer to dull my faculties.”[769]

It can scarcely be doubted that he is describing the position which he himself held at home, in an essay which he published in the _London Magazine_ in 1781 (p. 253):

“I knew a father who was a violent Whig, and used to attack his son for being a Tory, upbraiding him with being deficient in ‘noble sentiments of liberty,’ while at the same time he made this son live under his roof in such bondage, that he was not only afraid to stir from home without leave, like a child, but durst scarcely open his mouth in his father’s presence. This was sad living. Yet I would rather see such an excess of awe than a degree of familiarity between father and son by which all reverence is destroyed.”

Lord Auchinleck had taken unto himself a second wife on the very day of his son’s marriage. She was, in all likelihood, in the house at the time of Johnson’s visit, but neither by him nor Boswell is she once mentioned. She remained, no doubt, silent and insignificant. With their reception they must have been satisfied on the whole, as they prolonged their stay till the sixth day, in spite of the famous altercation which Boswell’s piety forbade him to record at any length. That only one such scene should have occurred speaks well for the self-control both of host and guest. To Boswell Johnson had quickly become attached. “Give me your hand,” he said to him in the first weeks of their acquaintance, “I have taken a liking to you.” A month or so later he added, “There are few people to whom I take so much as to you.” But Lord Auchinleck, though he might have respected he never could have liked. No men were more unlike in everything but personal appearance, than Boswell and his father. The old man had none of that “facility of manners,” of which, according to Adam Smith, the son “was happily possessed.”[770] Whence he got it we are nowhere told—perhaps from his mother. It certainly was not from his paternal grandfather, the old advocate, “who was a slow, dull man of unwearied perseverance and unmeasurable length in his speeches. It was alleged he never understood a cause till he had lost it thrice.”[771] [Sidenote: BOSWELL’S DUTCH BLOOD.] There were those who attributed Boswell’s eccentricities to his great grandmother, Veronica, Countess of Kincardine, a Dutch lady of the noble house of Sommelsdyck. “For this marriage,” writes Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “their posterity paid dear, for most of them had peculiarities which they had better have wanted.” He adds that “Boswell’s behaviour on the occasion of the riots in Edinburgh about the Douglas cause, savoured so much of insanity, that it was generally imputed to his Dutch blood.”[772] Why madness was supposed to come from Holland I do not know. Sir William Temple, writing of that country, says: “In general all appetites and passions seem to run lower and cooler here than in other countries where I have conversed. Their tempers are not airy enough for joy or any unusual strains of pleasant humour, nor warm enough for love. This is talked of sometimes among the younger men, but as a thing they have heard of rather than felt; and as a discourse that becomes them rather than affects them.”[773] All this was the very reverse of Boswell’s eager and wild youth, though perhaps not unlike the character of his father and grandfather. [Sidenote: AUCHINLECK LIBRARY.] There was one thing in common between Johnson and the old judge, both were sound scholars. At Auchinleck there was a library “which,” says Boswell, “incurious editions of the Greek and Roman classics is, I suppose, not excelled by any private collection in Great Britain.”

Here Johnson found an edition of Anacreon which he had long sought in vain. “They had therefore much matter for conversation without touching on the fatal topics of difference.” In all questions of Church and State they were wide as the poles asunder. In the perfect confidence which each man had in his own judgment there was nothing to choose between them.