Part 27

[Sidenote: LORD AUCHINLECK.]

“My father,” writes Boswell, “was as sanguine a Whig and Presbyterian as Dr. Johnson was a Tory and Church-of-England man: and as he had not much leisure to be informed of Dr. Johnson’s great merits by reading his works, he had a partial and unfavourable notion of him, founded on his supposed political tenets; which were so discordant to his own, that instead of speaking of him with that respect to which he was entitled, he used to call him ‘_a Jacobite fellow_.’ Knowing all this, I should not have ventured to bring them together, had not my father, out of kindness to me, desired me to invite Dr. Johnson to his house. I was very anxious that all should be well; and begged of my friend to avoid three topics, as to which they differed very widely; Whiggism, Presbyterianism, and—Sir John Pringle. He said courteously, ‘I shall certainly not talk on subjects which I am told are disagreeable to a gentleman under whose roof I am; especially, I shall not do so to _your father_.’”

Yet with all Lord Auchinleck’s gravity and contempt of his son’s flightiness, he had known what it was not only to be young, but to be foolish. Like so many of the young Scotchmen of old, he had been sent to Holland to study civil law. Thence he had made his way to Paris, where he had played the fop. Years afterwards one of the companions of his youth, meeting his son at Lord Kames’s table, “told him that he had seen his father strutting abroad in red-heeled shoes and red stockings. The lad was so much diverted with it that he could hardly sit on his chair for laughing.”[774] His appointment as judge he owed to that most corrupt of Whig ministers, the Duke of Newcastle,[775] and he was as Whiggish as his patron. King William III., “one of the most worthless scoundrels that ever existed,” according to Johnson, was to him the greatest hero in modern times. Presbyterianism he loved all the more because it was a cheap religion, and narrowed the power of the clergy. He laid it down as a rule that a poor clergy was ever a pure clergy. He added that in former times they had timber communion cups and silver ministers, but now we were getting silver cups and timber ministers.[776] According to Sir Walter Scott he carried “his Whiggery and Presbyterianism to such a height, that once, when a countryman came in to state some justice business, and being required to make his oath, declined to do so before his lordship, because he was not a _covenanted_ magistrate—‘Is that a’ your objection, mon?’ said the judge: ‘come your ways in here, and we’ll baith of us tak the solemn league and covenant together.’ The oath was accordingly agreed and sworn to by both, and I dare say it was the last time it ever received such homage.”[777] He would have nothing to do with clearing his tongue of Scotticisms, or with smoothing and rounding his periods on the model of the English classical authors. “His Scotch was broad and vulgar.”[778] In one thing at all events he was sure of receiving Johnson’s warm approval. He was a great planter of trees. “It was,” he said, “his favourite recreation. In his vacations he used to prune with his own hands the trees which he himself had planted. Beginning at five in the morning, he wrought with his knife every spare hour. Of Auchinleck he was passionately fond.”[779] He was not the man to prefer Fleet Street to the beauties of Nature. “I perceive some dawnings of taste for the country,” wrote his son on one of his visits to his old home. “I will force a taste for rural beauties.”[780] He never succeeded in the attempt, and though he often boasted of “walking among the rocks and woods of his ancestors,” it was from a distance that he most admired them.

Rarely were two men more unlike. The old man had in excess that foresight which in Boswell was so largely wanting. He had built himself a new house, which Johnson describes as “very magnificent and very convenient;” but he had proceeded “so slowly and prudently that he hardly felt the expense.”[781] Across the front of it he put the inscription—

“Quod petis hic est, Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit æquus.”[782]

“It is,” writes Boswell, “characteristic of the founder; but the _animus æquus_ is, alas! not inheritable, nor the subject of devise. He always talked to me as if it were in a man’s own power to attain it; but Dr. Johnson told me that he owned to him, when they were alone, his persuasion that it was in a great measure constitutional, or the effect of causes which do not depend on ourselves, and that Horace boasts too much when he says, _æquum mi animum ipse parabo_.”

[Sidenote: JAMES BOSWELL.]

He had, too, that sobriety of character in which his son was so conspicuously wanting. “His age, his office, and his character, had given him an acknowledged claim to great attention in whatever company he was, and he could ill brook any diminution of it.” He was by no means deficient in humour, and in this respect father and son were alike. “He had a great many good stories, which he told uncommonly well, and he was remarkable for ‘humour, _incolumi gravitate_,’ as Lord Monboddo used to characterize it.”

The contrast between his dignity and gravity, and Boswell’s bustling and most comical liveliness, must have been as amusing as it was striking. His ignorance of his son’s genius, and the contempt for him which he did not conceal, heightened the picture. Johnson’s presence would have greatly added to the interest of the scene, for Boswell must have constantly wavered between his admiration of his idol and his awe of his father. A few years later Miss Burney met Boswell at Streatham, and thus describes him, no doubt with a good deal of exaggeration:

“He spoke the Scotch accent strongly. He had an odd mock solemnity of manner, that he had acquired imperceptibly from constantly thinking of and imitating Dr. Johnson. There was something slouching in his gait and dress, that wore an air, ridiculously enough, of purporting to personify the same model. His clothes were always too large for him; his hair or wig was constantly in a state of negligence; and he never for a moment sat still or upright upon a chair. When he met with Dr. Johnson he commonly forbore even answering anything that was said, or attending to anything that went forward, lest he should miss the smallest sound from that voice to which he paid such exclusive homage. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropt open to catch every syllable that might be uttered. The Doctor generally treated him as a schoolboy, whom without the smallest ceremony he pardoned or rebuked alternately.”[783]

It is probable that this description is heightened by Miss Burney’s wounded vanity. Boswell had not read her _Evelina_, and when he was reproached by Johnson with being a Brangton—one of the characters in the novel—he did not know what was meant. She was as careful in recording the conversation that was about herself as Boswell was in recording Johnson’s. Her great hero was herself. The voices to which she paid her homage were those in which she was praised and flattered.

In another place she describes “the singularity of his comic-serious face and manner.”[784] He himself has more than once drawn his own character. He was, he flattered himself, a citizen of the world; one who in his travels never felt himself from home. In that impudent _Correspondence_ which he and his friend Andrew Erskine published when they were still almost lads, he thus describes himself:

“The author of the _Ode to Tragedy_ is a most excellent man; he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness. His parts are bright; and his education has been good. He has travelled in post-chaises miles without number. He is fond of seeing much of the world. He eats of every good dish, especially apple-pie. He drinks old hock. He has a very fine temper. He is somewhat of an humorist, and a little tinctured with pride. He has a good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous. He has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast. He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old. His shoes are neatly made, and he never wears spectacles.”[785]

We have a later description of him again by his own hand, as he was at the time of his tour with Johnson.

“Think, then (he says), of a gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant passion. He was then in his thirty-third year, and had been about four years happily married. His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father, a respectable judge, had pressed him into the profession of the law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties of human life. He had thought more than anybody supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. He had all Dr. Johnson’s principles, with some degree of relaxation. He had rather too little, than too much prudence; and, his imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect was very different from the intention. He resembled sometimes

‘The best good man, with the worst natur’d muse.’”

Johnson celebrated his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness, his acuteness, his gaiety of conversation, and civility of manners. “He was,” he said, “the best travelling companion in the world.” According to Burke, “his good nature was so natural to him that he had no merit in possessing it. A man might as well assume to himself merit in possessing an excellent constitution.” Reynolds loved him so well that “he left him £200 in his will, to be expended, if he thought proper, in the purchase of a picture at the sale of his paintings, to be kept for his sake.”[786] In a memoir of him in the _Scots Magazine_ he is described as “a most pleasant companion, affectionate and friendly; but, particularly in his latter days, he betrayed a vanity which seemed to predominate.”[787] Tytler praises “his sprightly fancy and whimsical eccentricity,” which “agreeably tempered the graver conversation” of Adam Smith or Hugh Blair at the small and select parties given by Lord Kames.[788]

[Sidenote: THE COLLISION IN THE LIBRARY.]

He was welcome everywhere but at his own father’s house. Neither was he the better thought of by the old man on account of the great Englishman whom he brought with him. Everything however went off smoothly for a day or two, but the host and his guest at length came in collision over Lord Auchinleck’s collection of medals. The scene is thus described by Boswell, who witnessed it:

“Oliver Cromwell’s coin unfortunately introduced Charles the First and Toryism. They became exceedingly warm and violent, and I was very much distressed by being present at such an altercation between two men, both of whom I reverenced; yet I durst not interfere. It would certainly be very unbecoming in me to exhibit my honoured father and my respected friend, as intellectual gladiators, for the entertainment of the public; and, therefore, I suppress what would, I dare say, make an interesting scene in this dramatic sketch—this account of the transit of Johnson over the Caledonian Hemisphere.”

Ramsay of Ochtertyre says, that the year after this famous altercation, Lord Auchinleck “told him with warmth that the great Dr. Johnson, of whom he had heard wonders, was just a dominie, and the worst-bred dominie he had ever seen.”[789] The account which Sir Walter Scott gives is very dramatic, though no doubt somewhat embellished.

“Old Lord Auchinleck (he writes) was an able lawyer, a good scholar, after the manner of Scotland, and highly valued his own advantages as a man of good estate and ancient family; and, moreover, he was a strict Presbyterian and Whig of the old Scottish cast. This did not prevent his being a terribly proud aristocrat; and great was the contempt he entertained and expressed for his son James, for the nature of his friendships and the character of the personages of whom he was _engoué_ one after another. ‘There’s nae hope for Jamie, mon,’ he said to a friend. ‘Jamie is gaen clean gyte.[790] What do you think, mon? He’s done wi’ Paoli—he’s off wi’ the land-louping[791] scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon?’ Here the old judge summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. ‘A _dominie_, mon—an auld dominie: he keeped a schŭle, and cau’d it an acaadamy.”

[Sidenote: SCOTCH DOMINIES.]

The full force of Lord Auchinleck’s contempt is only seen when we understand the position of a _dominie_. The character of a schoolmaster, generally, according to Johnson, was less honourable in Scotland than in England.[792] But the dominie, or tutor in a family, was still less esteemed. “He was raised,” writes Sir Walter Scott, “from a humble class to a society where, whatever his personal attainments might be, he found himself placed at a humiliating distance from anything like a footing of equality. His remuneration was scanty in the extreme, and consisting (as if to fill up the measure of his dependence) not entirely of a fixed salary, but partly of the precarious prospect of future preferment in the Church. The Scotch _dominie_ was assuredly one of the most pitiable of human beings.”[793] It is a curious and perhaps a somewhat suspicious fact, that a very few years before Sir Walter supplied Mr. Croker with this amusing story about the old judge, he had put on record in the pages of the _Quarterly Review_ the following anecdote: “When the old Scots judge Lord Auchinleck first heard of Johnson’s coming to visit him at his rural _castellum_, he held up his hands in astonishment, and cried out, ‘Our Jeemy’s clean aff the hooks now! would ony body believe it? he’s bringing down a _dominie_ wi’ him—an auld dominie.’”[794] This looks like a different version of the same story. Moreover, Boswell tells us that his father had desired him to invite him to his house. When Johnson called his school at Lichfield an academy, he does not seem to have used the term pretentiously, for in his _Dictionary_ he defines the word under one of its meanings as “a place of education in contradistinction to the universities or public schools.” It does not seem likely, moreover, that Lord Auchinleck had any feeling of contempt for Pascal Paoli, a man of good family, who for years had headed a rebellion against the tyranny first of Genoa and afterwards of France. He had visited Auchinleck two years before Johnson, and had been well received. Boswell, writing to Garrick on September 18, 1771, said: “I have just been enjoying the very great happiness of a visit from my illustrious friend, Pascal Paoli. He was two nights at Auchinleck, and you may figure the joy of my worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican hero in our romantic groves. Count Burgynski, the Polish ambassador, accompanied him.”[795] Poland’s days of sending ambassadors had nearly drawn to an end, for the first partition of the country was made in the following year. It was a strange chance which brought the last Corsican patriot and the last Polish ambassador to this Ayrshire mansion. One thing only was wanting. Would that Burns that day had played truant and had wandered up “Lugar’s winding stream” as far as Auchinleck! It would, indeed, have formed an interesting group—the stiff old Scotch judge and his famous son, the great Corsican patriot and the Pole, with the peasant-lad gazing at them with his eyes full of beauty and wonder. Paoli’s name is well-nigh forgotten now, but he and his Corsicans deeply stirred the hearts of our forefathers. Boswell, by a private subscription in Scotland, had sent out to him in one week £700 worth of ordnance—“a tolerable train of artillery.”[796] His account of his tour in that island had been widely read. Even his father “was rather fond of it. ‘James,’ he said, ‘had taken a _tout_ on a new horn.’”[797] Whether Lord Auchinleck abused Paoli “as a land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican,” or admired him as he admired other great patriots, the rest of Sir Walter Scott’s account of the great altercation may be true enough:

[Sidenote: THE “LITH” IN THE NECKS OF KINGS.]

“The controversy between Tory and Covenanter raged with great fury, and ended in Johnson’s pressing upon the old judge the question, what good Cromwell, of whom he had said something derogatory, had ever done to his country; when, after being much tortured, Lord Auchinleck at last spoke out, ‘God, Doctor! he gart kings ken that they had a _lith_ in their neck’—he taught kings they had a _joint_ in their necks.”

This story did not, I believe, appear in print till the year 1831, when it was given as a note by Scott in Mr. Croker’s edition of _Boswell_. Fifty years earlier it had been told in somewhat different words of Quin the player, who had said that “on a thirtieth of January every king in Europe would rise with a crick in his neck.” Davies, who records the anecdote, says that it had been attributed to Voltaire, but unjustly.[798] It is possible, and even not unlikely, that we have but a Scotch version of an English saying. Cromwell himself, in his letter to the governor of Edinburgh Castle, had shown that he too saw this consequence of his great deed. “The civil authority,” he writes, “turned out a Tyrant in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honour, and all Tyrants in the world look at with fear.”[799]

In one happy though impudent retort, Lord Auchinleck was very successful.

[Sidenote: DURHAM ON THE GALATIANS.]

“Dr. Johnson challenged him (writes Boswell) to point out any theological works of merit written by Presbyterian ministers in Scotland. My father, whose studies did not lie much in that way, owned to me afterwards, that he was somewhat at a loss how to answer, but that luckily he recollected having read in catalogues the title of _Durham on the Galatians_; upon which he boldly said, ‘Pray, Sir, have your read Mr. Durham’s excellent commentary on the Galatians?’ ‘No, Sir,’ said Dr. Johnson. By this lucky thought my father kept him at bay, and for some time enjoyed his triumph; but his antagonist soon made a retort, which I forbear to mention.”

In the long list of Durham’s theological works in the British Museum catalogue I find no mention of this book on the Galatians. The old judge, it is clear, had not forgotten in the years which he had sat on the bench the arts of the advocate. In Rowlandson’s Caricatures there is a humorous picture of _The Contest at Auchinleck_. Johnson is drawn felling his opponent with a huge liturgy, having made him drop two books equally big, entitled _Calvin_ and _Whiggism_. On the floor are lying the medals over which the dispute had begun, while Boswell is at the door in an attitude of despair, with his _Journal_ falling from his hands.

One figure was wanting to make the picture complete. Of the three topics on which Johnson had been warned not to touch only two had been introduced. “In the course of their altercation,” writes Boswell, “Whiggism and Presbyterianism, Toryism and Episcopacy, were terribly buffeted. My worthy hereditary friend, Sir John Pringle, never having been mentioned, happily escaped without a bruise.” We could have wished that he had been mentioned, for though we know of the dislike which existed between the two men, yet as he has never “hitched” in one of Johnson’s strong sayings, he has scarcely attained that fame which he deserved.

Towards Lord Auchinleck Johnson bore no resentment. With him the heat of altercation soon passed away, but not the memory of the hospitality which he had received in his house. In not a single word spoken or written has he attacked him. On the contrary, in his _Journey to the Western Islands_, he only mentions him to praise him. When, six years later, he published the first four volumes of his _Lives of the Poets_, he wrote to Boswell: “Write me word to whom I shall send sets of _Lives_; would it please Lord Auchinleck?” A few months after this he wrote to him: “Let me know what reception you have from your father, and the state of his health. Please him as much as you can, and add no pain to his last years.” The old lord was not so placable. He had that “want of tenderness which,” said Johnson, “is want of parts.” This part of his character is seen in the following anecdote recorded of him by his son:

“I mentioned to Johnson a respectable person of a very strong mind, who had little of that tenderness which is common to human nature; as an instance of which, when I suggested to him that he should invite his son, who had been settled ten years in foreign parts, to come home and pay him a visit, his answer was, ‘No, no, let him mind his business.’ JOHNSON. ‘I do not agree with him, Sir, in this. Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.’”

[Sidenote: LORD AUCHINLECK’S RESENTMENT.]

He had what Boswell calls “the dignified courtesy of an old Baron,” and when Johnson left “was very civil to him, and politely attended him to his post-chaise.” But he was not in the least soothed by the compliments which he paid him in his book. Boswell had hoped that he might be moved. Writing to Johnson just after it had been published, he said: “You have done Auchinleck much honour, and have, I hope, overcome my father, who has never forgiven your warmth for monarchy and episcopacy. I am anxious to see how your pages will operate upon him.”[800] His anxious wish was grievously disappointed. A few months later he wrote to his friend Temple: “My father is most unhappily dissatisfied with me.... He harps on my going over Scotland with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous!) and wandering (or some such phrase) to London. How hard it is that I am totally excluded from parental comfort! I have a mind to go to Auchinleck next autumn, and try what living in a mixed stupidity of attention to common objects and restraint from expressing any of my own feelings can do with him.”[801] When his father and Johnson were both dead he indulged in the pious hope that “as they were both worthy Christian men, they had met in happiness. But I must observe,” he adds, “in justice to my friend’s political principles and my own, that they have met in a place where there is no room for _Whiggism_.” Johnson, it is true, “always said the first Whig was the Devil,” but on the other hand, some Presbyterian who drew up an epitaph on Lochiel, declared in it that he “is now a Whig in heaven.”[802]