Part 28

That pride in his ancient blood, which Boswell boasted was his predominant passion, was very strong in the old lord. In the son, if it really existed in any strength, it was happily overpowered by a host of other and better feelings. He had travelled widely, he had seen a great variety of men, some of them among the most famous of their age, and had learnt to value genius without troubling himself about its pedigree. His successors at Auchinleck had something of the narrowness of the old judge. [Sidenote: SIR ALEXANDER BOSWELL.] “His eldest son, Sir Alexander Boswell,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “was a proud man, and like his grandfather, thought that his father lowered himself by his deferential suit and service to Johnson. I have observed he disliked any allusion to the book or to Johnson himself, and I have heard that Johnson’s fine picture by Sir Joshua was sent upstairs out of the sitting apartments.”[803] He was not too proud a man to write a poem on the anniversary of the Accession of George IV., and what is George IV. now? It was not from any dulness of mind that he did not value his father’s book. “He had,” says Lockhart, “all _Bozzy’s_ cleverness, good-humour, and joviality, without one touch of his meaner qualities, wrote some popular songs, which he sang capitally, and was moreover a thorough bibliomaniac.”[804] It was due to him and a friend, that the Burns monument at Ayr was erected. They summoned a public meeting, but no one attended except themselves. Little daunted they appointed a chairman, proposed resolutions, carried them unanimously, passed a vote of thanks, and issued subscription lists. More than £2,000 was subscribed, and the monument was opened by Sir Alexander shortly before his death. That he was not wanting in tenderness of heart is shown by some of his poems. How pretty is the following verse in an address by an aged father to his children:—

“The auld will speak, the young maun hear, Be cantie, but be gude and leal; Your ain ills aye hae heart to bear, Anither’s aye hae heart to feel.

So, ere I set, I’ll see ye shine; I’ll see ye triumph ere I fa’; My parting breath shall boast you mine— Good night, and joy be wi’ ye a’.”[805]

Lockhart goes, however, too far when he exalts him in comparison with his father. Boswell, I feel sure, would never have been guilty of the act which involved his son in the unhappy duel in which he lost his life. In two scurrilous newspapers he had secretly defamed his kinsman, Mr. James Stuart, of Dunearn, “with whom he had long been on good terms.” Though the articles were written in a disguised hand, the authorship was detected. He received a challenge from the injured man, and at the first shot fell mortally wounded. He dined with Scott a day or two before the duel, and “though Charles Matthews (the famous comedian) was present, poor Sir Alexander Boswell’s songs, jokes, and anecdotes exhibited no symptom of eclipse.”[806]

[Sidenote: SIR JAMES BOSWELL.]

His only son, Sir James Boswell, the last male descendant of the author of the immortal _Life_, shared his father’s illiberal feelings about Johnson. Miss Macleod of Macleod told me that when she was on a visit at Auchinleck, he said to her one day that he did not know how he should name one of his race-horses. She suggested Boswell’s Johnsoniana, which made him very angry. He was, I learnt, a man of great natural ability, who, had he chosen, might have become distinguished. His feeling of soreness against his grandfather was partly due to another cause than dislike of hero-worship. Boswell, in an access of that particular kind of folly which he called “feudal enthusiasm,” had entailed his estates on the heirs male of his father to the exclusion of his own nearer female descendants. Sir James, who had no sons, saw that Auchinleck on his death would pass away from his daughters to his cousin, Thomas Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck’s grandson by his second son David. He managed to get the settlement upset on the plea that in the deed the first five letters of the word _irredeemably_ were written upon an erasure.[807] It is not impossible that the lawyer who drew it up, not liking the provision, intentionally contrived this loop-hole.

Among Boswell’s male descendants, his second son James was, so far as I know, the only one who was not ashamed of the _Life of Johnson_. He supplied notes to the later editions. His father, writing of him when he was eleven years old, says: “My second son is an extraordinary boy; he is much of his father (vanity of vanities).”[808] Croker describes him as “very convivial, and in other respects like his father—though altogether on a smaller scale.”[809] According to Lockhart, he was “a man of considerable learning and admirable social qualities. To him Sir Walter Scott was warmly attached. He died suddenly in the prime of life, about a fortnight before his brother.”[810]

When Boswell, at the age of twenty-seven, published his _Account of Corsica_, he boasted in his preface that “he cherished the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object to the noblest minds in all ages.” When he saw his _Life of Johnson_ reach its second edition, he said with a frankness which is almost touching, “I confess that I am so formed by nature and by habit, that to restrain the effusion of delight on having obtained such fame, to me would be truly painful. Why then should I suppress it? Why ‘out of the abundance of the heart’ should I not speak?” He goes on to mention the spontaneous praise which he has received from eminent persons, “much of which,” he adds, “I have under their hands to be reposited in my archives at Auchinleck.” How little did he foresee that his executors, with a brutish ignorance worthy of perpetual execration, would destroy his manuscripts! If Oliver Goldsmith had had children and grand-children, they too, when they read of his envy and his vanity, when they were told that “in conversation he was an empty, noisy, blundering rattle,”[811] might have blushed to own that they were sprung from the author of _The Deserted Village_ and _The Vicar of Wakefield_.

[Sidenote: BOSWELL’S DESCENDANTS.]

It is a melancholy thing that Boswell’s descendants should have seen their famous ancestor’s faults so clearly as to have been unable to enjoy that pride which was so justly their due, in being sprung from a man of such real, if curious genius. Was it nothing to have written the best biography which the world has ever seen? Nothing to have increased more than any writer of his generation “the public stock of harmless pleasure?” Nothing to have “exhibited” with the greatest skill “a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near half a century?” Nothing to have been the delight of men of the greatest and most varied genius? Nothing to be read wherever the English tongue is spoken, and, as seems likely, as long as the English tongue shall last? _Sume superbiam quæsitam meritis_, “Assume the honours justly thine,” we would say to each one of his race.

[Sidenote: BOSWELL’S FAME.]

How widely Boswell’s influence is felt is shown in a story which was told me by Sir Charles Sikes, the benevolent inventor of the Post Office Savings Banks, and no mean Johnsonian. One day he had gone under an archway in Fleet Street to shun a shower, as Burke might have gone.[812] Being “knowing and conversible,” he fell into talk with a sergeant of police who was also taking shelter, and whose tongue showed that he was an Irishman. He came, he said, from the west of Ireland. When he was a boy the parish priest had lent him a copy of the _Life of Johnson_. He had read it again and again, till at last the wish grew so strong upon him to see with his own eyes the scenes which in the pages of the book were so familiar to him, that he came to London, not knowing what employment he should find, but bent on seeing Fleet Street. What pilgrimages have not men made from the other side of the Atlantic to the same spots! With their Boswell in their hands they have wandered by Charing Cross, “with its full tide of human existence;” up the Strand, “through the greatest series of shops in the world;” under Temple Bar, where Johnson’s and Goldsmith’s names did _not_ mingle with those of the Scotch rebels[813]; along Fleet Street, with “its very animated appearance,” to the courts and lanes and taverns where the spirits of the men who gathered round the great Lexicographer seem still to linger. The Boswells are proud of their descent from a man who fell at Flodden Field. There are thousands and ten thousands of Scotchmen who got knocked on their heads in border forays, but only one who wrote the _Life of Johnson_. “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors,” and among Scotch authors Sir Walter Scott alone equals Boswell in the extent of his popularity. The genius of Burns lies hidden from most Englishmen in the dialect in which his finest poetry is written. Never did one man of letters do another a more shameful wrong than when Macaulay laboured at the ridiculous paradox that the first of biographers was “a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect.” He was thirty years old when he wrote this. Yet, to borrow Johnson’s words, it was such stuff as a young man talks when he first begins to think himself a clever fellow, and he ought to have been whipped for it. The worst of it is that Macaulay, like Rousseau, talked his nonsense so well that it still passes for gospel with all those who have advanced as far as reading, but have not as yet attained to thinking. We may feel thankful that he did not with his overpowering common sense go on to overwhelm the memory of Goldsmith.

In the price set on autographs we have a means of measuring in some fashion the estimation in which men are held by posterity. The standard is but a rough one, however, for it is affected by the number of their writings which chance to have been preserved: judging by it, Boswell’s rank is very high. There were, probably, few men whose career he more envied than that of Lord Bute’s “errand-goer,” Alexander Wedderburne, who rose to be Lord Loughborough, Earl of Rosslyn and Lord High Chancellor of England. Yet a letter of his I have recently seen offered for sale at ten shillings and sixpence, while Boswell’s was marked nine guineas. While I exult at seeing that one author equals eighteen Lord Chancellors, I sometimes sigh over the high prices which have hitherto kept me from obtaining a specimen of the handwriting of a man at whose works I have so long laboured.

It is to be hoped that the day will at length come when those in whose veins Boswell’s blood still flows will take that just and reasonable view of their famous forefather which will lead them, from time to time, to throw open “the rocks and woods,” and even “the stately house” of Auchinleck to strangers from afar. It was he who “Johnsonised the land,” and they therefore should have some indulgence for the enthusiasm which he created. “The sullen dignity of the castle with which Johnson was delighted” they should not keep altogether to themselves. Another famous man had beheld those ruins also. “Since Paoli stood upon our old castle,” wrote Boswell to a friend, “it has an additional dignity.” Who would not like to stand upon it also, and to see the Lugar running beneath, “bordered by high rocks shaded with wood?” Into this beautiful stream falls “a pleasing brook,” to use Johnson’s odd description of a rivulet which has cut a deep passage through the sandstone. “It runs,” he adds, “by a red rock, out of which has been hewn a very agreeable and commodious summer-house.” I have been told that the meeting of the waters is a scene of striking beauty. Then there are “the venerable old trees under the shade of which,” writes Boswell, “my ancestors had walked,” and the groves where, as he told Johnson, it was his intention to erect a monument to his “reverend friend.” “Sir,” he answered, little flattered by the prospect of “a lapidary inscription,” “I hope to see your grand-children.” Who would not gladly stroll along Lord Auchinleck’s _via sacra_, “that road which he made to the church, for above three miles, on his own estate, through a range of well-inclosed farms, with a row of trees on each side of it?” The avenue is composed mainly of oaks and beeches, planted alternately; but the finest of the trees were brought down a few years ago in a great storm which swept over the country. Only one or two small farms remain, but there are the ruins of another. From the road a most pleasant view is seen, grassy slopes running down to the Lugar, with hedge-rows and trees growing in them after the English fashion. Across the river the ground rises rapidly in tilled fields and meadows and groves to a high range of hills. To the south-west lies the village of Ochiltree, whence Scott perhaps derived old Edie’s name in the _Antiquary_.

[Sidenote: AUCHINLECK MANSE.]

The manse still stands where Johnson dined with the Rev. John Dun, who had been Boswell’s _dominie_, and had been rewarded for his services by the presentation to the living of Auchinleck. He rashly attacked before his guest the Church of England, and “talked of fat bishops and drowsy deans. Dr. Johnson was so highly offended, that he said to him, ‘Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot.’” Dun must have complained to Boswell of being thus publicly likened to the proverbial Hottentot, for in the second edition of the _Tour to the Hebrides_ his name is suppressed. The manse has been enlarged since those days, and surrounded with a delightful garden which might excite the envy, if not of a drowsy dean, at all events of a south country vicar. In the venerable minister, Dr. James Chrystal, who has lived there for more than fifty years, Johnson would have found a man “whom, if he should have quarrelled with him, he would have found the most difficulty how to abuse.”

[Sidenote: AUCHINLECK CHURCHYARD.]

The parish church where Johnson refused to attend Boswell and his father at public worship has been rebuilt. In the churchyard stands a fine old beech which might have been called venerable even a hundred years ago. There, too, is the vault of the Boswells with their coat-of-arms engraved on it, and their motto, _Vraye Foy_. In a niche cut in the solid rock lies Boswell’s body. He died in London, at his house in Great Portland Street, but in accordance with the direction in his will he was buried “in the family burial-place in the church of Auchinleck.” Though the vault is now at a little distance from the church, yet in the old building, which did not occupy precisely the same site, it was under a room at the back of the Boswells’ pew. On a wall in the churchyard I noticed a curiously-carved stone with the following inscription:

M G. W. 1621 M. G. HUNC TUMULUM CONJUNX POSUIT DILECTA MARITO. QUEMQUE VIRO POSUIT DESTINAT HORA SIBI.

————

THIS STONE WAS ERECTED 1621 IN MEMORY OF THE

REVD. GEORGE WALKER

WHO WAS PASTOR OF THIS PARISH. REPAIRED BY OLD MORTALITY IN HIS DAY AND RENEWED AND PLACED HERE IN 1855.

“Auchinleck,” said the landlady of my inn, “is the very heart of the Covenanters’ district.” Hard by, at Airdsmoss, the founder of the Cameronians, with seven or eight of his followers, was slain in July, 1681. In the churchyard lies buried a man of a very different type of character—William Murdoch, the inventor of gas. Two of Boswell’s tenants were James and William Murdoch. They and their forefathers had possessed their farms for many generations.[814] Perhaps not only the _Life of Boswell_, but illumination by gas takes its rise from Auchinleck.

The village consists mainly of one long street of solidly-built stone houses; the older ones thatched and often white-washed, the modern ones slated. At the back are good gardens well stocked with fruit trees. Bare feet are far more common here than in the Highlands or Hebrides. All the children, with scarcely an exception, and many of the women, go bare-footed. As I passed down the street a “roup,” or sale by auction, was going on before the house of a deceased “baker, violin-maker, clock-mender, blood-letter, dentist, geologist, and collector of coins.” The auctioneer, standing on the doorstep of this departed worthy, who at one and the same time had played many parts, dispersed his motley goods to the four quarters of heaven. The best of his violins, for he had had some of considerable value, had been sent for sale to Glasgow. I stayed in the Railway Hotel, a curious old house, which boasted of two sitting-rooms and one bed-room. It was clean and comfortable, and in my courteous landlady I found a woman of sense and education. She quoted _Sartor Resartus_, and spoke with anger of Mr. Froude’s _Life of Carlyle_. In Scotland the traveller finds book-learning far more generally diffused than in England.

In Boswell’s time Auchinleck, he tells us, was pronounced Affléck. His grand-daughter, who died in 1836, informed Mr. Croker that in her time it had come to be pronounced as it is written. I learnt however from Dr. Chrystal that “the name Affléck is still quite common as applied to the parish, and even Auchinleck House is as often called Place Affléck as otherwise.” A lad whom I questioned on the subject told me that the old people call it Affléck but the young Auchinleck. The old pronunciation will no doubt soon disappear.

[Sidenote: BOSWELL AS A LANDLORD.]

Boswell had been a kind landlord. Johnson, in the early days of their acquaintance, “had recommended to him a liberal kindness to his tenantry, as people over whom the proprietor was placed by Providence.” The advice was congenial to his natural disposition. In his will, which he made ten years before his death, he says: “As there are upon the estate of Auchinleck several tenants whose families have possessed their farms for many generations, I do by these presents grant leases for nineteen years and their respective lives to”—here follow the names of eight tenants. He continues:—“And I do beseech all the succeeding heirs of entail to be kind to the tenants, and not to turn out old possessors to get a little more rent.” We may venture to express a hope that his descendants, if they have slighted him as an author, have always honoured and followed him as a landlord.

HAMILTON, EDINBURGH, NEW HAILES, BALLENCRIEFF, AND CRANSTON, NOVEMBER 8-22.

[Sidenote: FROM AUCHINLECK TO EDINBURGH.]

Leaving Auchinleck on the morning of November 8, our travellers arrived that night at Hamilton on the road to Edinburgh. They had crossed Drumclog Moor, the scene of the skirmish nearly one hundred years earlier where Claverhouse was beaten by the Covenanters. Scott in _Old Mortality_ has told how in the fight John Balfour of Burley struck down Sergeant Bothwell. Fifty years or so after our travellers crossed the Moor, Thomas Carlyle and Edward Irving passed over it on foot. “It was here,” says Carlyle, “as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from me by degrees, in the softest manner, the confession that I did not think as he of the Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or should.”[815] Boswell’s record of this day’s journey is of the briefest. “We came at night to a good inn at Hamilton. I recollect no more.” A writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ gives us a humorous description of the innkeeper. “Hamilton Arms, kept by Burns, tolerable. The landlord from pure insipidity will laugh at you if you come in wet through; yet he can tell a good deal about the Duke’s family.”[816] Smollett gives the little town the highest praise in his vocabulary, by calling it “one of the neatest he had seen in any country.”[817] Whatever nature could do, the force of art could no farther go last century than make a place neat. Boswell, before they left next morning, in vain tried to move Johnson to visit the Palace of Hamilton, as the Duke’s castle is called. “He had not come to Scotland to see fine places of which there were enough in England.” He would do nothing more than view the outside. [Sidenote: RETURN TO EDINBURGH.] That same night “they arrived at Edinburgh after an absence of eighty-three days. For five weeks together of the tempestuous season,” adds Boswell, “there had been no account received of us.” Yet, as the crow flies, they had never at their farthest been two hundred miles away. How vast is the change since those days! I received the other day at my house in Oxford, a letter which had been posted in Bombay just fifteen days before. Johnson would have hurried on to London had he followed his own wishes. “I long to come under your care,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale a day or two after his arrival in Edinburgh, “but for some days cannot decently get away.” He had his morning levees to hold, and his dinner and supper parties to attend. “‘Sir,’ he said one evening, ‘we have been harassed by invitations.’ I acquiesced. ‘Ay, sir,’ he replied, ‘but how much worse would it have been if we had been neglected!’” There was one man who did not harass him. Boswell nowhere mentions that he visited Lord Auchinleck at his house in Parliament Close.

[Sidenote: LORD HAILES.]

He paid a visit to New Hailes, four miles east of Edinburgh, the seat of Sir David Dalrymple, better known by the title of Lord Hailes, which he bore as one of the judges of Scotland. “Here,” says Boswell, “we passed a most agreeable day, but,” he adds, “again I must lament that I was so indolent as to let almost all that passed evaporate into oblivion.” Johnson had first heard of his host ten years earlier. One evening, when he and Boswell were supping in a private room at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house in the Strand, “he drank a bumper to Sir David Dalrymple as ‘a man of worth, a scholar, and a wit. I have,’ said he, ‘never heard of him, except from you; but let him know my opinion of him; for, as he does not show himself much in the world, he should have the praise of the few who hear of him.’” They did not meet till Johnson came to Edinburgh, but then they at once took to each other. “I love him better than any man whom I know so little,” wrote Johnson eighteen months later. His love was no doubt increased by the decision which his friend gave a few years later in that famous case in which it was decided, by a majority of the judges, that a slave who had been brought from Jamaica to Scotland became thereby free. “Dear Lord Hailes was on the side of liberty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell.[818] He would have loved him still more for the tenderness of heart which, unlike so many of his brethren, he showed on the Bench. “When called to pass sentence of death he addressed the unfortunate convicts in a pathetic, dignified strain of piety and commiseration that made a deep impression on the audience.”[819] Many of the old judges, as is shown by the stories recorded of them, were in criminal trials little better than ruffians in ermine. If “robes and furred gowns hide all,” in many a case they had far more cruelty to cover than the unfortunate prisoner had been guilty of who was sent to the gallows. Lord Hailes, with all his kindness, was by no means faultless as a judge. He too often allowed his pedantry to override his good sense. This failing in his friend, Boswell took off in his comic poem _The Court of Session Garland_:

“‘This cause,’ cries Hailes, ‘to judge I can’t pretend, For _justice_, I perceive, wants an _e_ at the end.’”