Part 9

Entering Edinburgh by the road which goes near Holyrood House, and driving along the Canongate, they alighted at the entrance to White Horse Close, at the end of which stood the White Horse Inn. The sign, the crest of the house of Hanover, had probably been adopted on the accession of George I., and was a proof of loyalty to the reigning family. In London in the year 1761 there were forty-nine alleys, lanes and yards which were so called.[393] It was, however, said that the name had been given as a memorial of a white horse which, by winning a race on Leith Sands, had saved its master, the inn-keeper, from ruin.[394] According to the Scotch custom the inn was generally known not by its sign, but by the name of its landlord.[395] Thus Boswell calls this house Boyd’s Inn. In the _Edinburgh Directory_ for 1773-4 we find under the letter B, at the head of the _Stablers_, “Boyd, James, canongate head.” In the present time, when an inn, however small, assumes the dignified title of _Hotel_, we may admire the modesty of these Edinburgh innkeepers, not one of whom, pretended to be anything more than a stabler. In fact they scarcely deserved any higher name; their houses were on a level with the inn at Rochester where the two carriers in Falstaff’s time passed so restless a night. A traveller who had stayed in this house a year or two before Johnson’s visit, described it as being “crowded and confused. The master lives in the stable, the mistress is not equal to the business. You must not expect breakfast before nine o’clock, and you must think yourself happy if you do not find every room fresh mopped.”[396] The date of 1683 inscribed upon the large window above the outside steps,[397] showed that even in Johnson’s time it was an old house. For the whole of the eighteenth century it was one of the chief starting places for the stage-coaches. It sank later on into a carrier’s inn, says Sir Walter Scott, “and has since been held unworthy even of that occupation. It was a base hovel.”[398] Yet James Boyd, who kept it, retired with a fortune of several thousand pounds. That he possessed napery to the value of five hundred pounds is stated by Chambers to be a well-authenticated fact. “A large room in the house was the frequent scene of the marriages of runaway English couples. On one of the windows were scratched the words:

‘Jeremiah and Sarah Bentham, 1768.’”[399]

It was from this miserable inn that Johnson, on August 14th, sent the following note to Boswell’s house:

“Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd’s.

“Saturday night.”

Boswell went to him directly, and learnt from Scott that “the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of the window. Scott said he was afraid that he would have knocked the waiter down.” Boswell at once carried off Johnson to his own house. Scott he left behind with the sincere regret that he had not also a room for him. Could the future eminence of the great judge have been foreseen, or had his “amiable manners” been generally known, surely some one would have been found eager to welcome him as a guest and rescue him from the Canongate Stabler. “He was one of the pleasantest men I ever knew,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, fifty-five years later, when he met him at a dinner at Richmond Park, “looking very frail and even comatose.”[400] He lived some while longer, and did not die till the memory of this jaunt, and of everything else had been lost in the forgetfulness in which his mind sank beneath the burthen of fourscore years and ten.[401] Let us hope that on his first visit to Edinburgh, like Matthew Bramble, “he got decent lodgings in the house of a widow gentlewoman.”[402]

The old inn still stands, a picturesque ruin and an interesting memorial of the discomfort of a long race of wandering strangers. No one here ever repeated with emotion, either great or small, Shenstone’s lines:

“Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round, Where’er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.”[403]

With a little care it could have been made a place where “a man might take his ease in his inn,” for it stood aloof from the noise of the street, was well-built and was sufficiently roomy. An outside stone staircase, which after a few steps turned right and left, led up to the first floor, where doubtless, according to the common Scotch custom, the principal rooms were placed. With its turrets and its gables it must have looked pleasant enough to the young runaway couples as they hurried in from the Canongate, and passed the outside staircases and open galleries of the houses on each side of the Close, and so went up to the large room where many a name was scratched with a diamond ring on the pane. “And they are gone,” gone like the lovers of St. Agnes’ Eve.[404]

JAMES’S COURT.

[Sidenote: JAMES’S COURT.]

“Boswell,” wrote Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, “has very handsome and spacious rooms; level with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other four stories high.” At this time he was living in James’s Court, on the northern side of the Lawnmarket, having lately removed from Chessel’s Buildings in the Canongate. It is not easy for the stranger who passes from the thronged street under the low archway into that quiet, but gloomy, and even shabby-looking court, to picture to himself the gay and lively company which once frequented it. Now ragged, bare-footed children are playing about; in some of the windows there are broken and patched panes of glass, while high above one’s head, from the different storeys, are hanging out to dry garments of various sorts and hues, on a curious kind of framework, let down by a pulley and string, till it stands out square from the wall. Some of the houses are coloured with a yellow wash, in others the stones round the windows and at the corners are painted red. The uncoloured stone is a grey darkened by years of smoke. The lower windows are guarded by iron gratings. On the southern, or Lawnmarket side, a block of building juts out, and makes a division in the Court. This projection looks as ancient as any part, and was doubtless there in those old days when the place was inhabited by a select set of gentlemen, “who kept a clerk to record their names and proceedings, had a scavenger of their own, clubbed in many public measures, and had balls and assemblies among themselves.”[405] It must have pleasantly recalled to Boswell the chambers which had been lent him in the Temple that summer in which he first became acquainted with Johnson, for it, too, was a nest of lawyers. There were inhabiting it at this time thirteen advocates, among them Lord Elibank, seven Writers to the Signet and Clerks of Session, a Commissioner, and two first clerks of advocates. The other householders were only six in number: two physicians, one of whom was Sir John Pringle,[406] the President of the Royal Society of London, a teller in the Old Bank, a teacher of French, a dancing-mistress, and a gentlewoman. Pringle, who was Boswell’s intimate friend, was one of “the three topics” which he begged Johnson to avoid at his father’s house—Presbyterianism and Whiggism being the other two. If any one of these subjects were introduced an altercation was certain to follow, for all three were as dear to Lord Auchinleck as they were distasteful to Johnson. Here Hume had lived till very lately in a house “which was very cheerful and even elegant, but was too small,” he complained, “to display his great talents for cookery.” Nevertheless it had been the one spot to which, when abroad, his heart untravelled had fondly turned. Even in the palace at Fontainebleau, while fresh from the flattery of the three young princes who were in turn to be kings of France, in this high tide of his fortune it was for “his easy-chair and his retreat in James’s Court that twice or thrice a day” he longed. Here he had welcomed Benjamin Franklin, here Adam Smith had been his frequent guest, and here he had offered a shelter to Rousseau. In his absence from Edinburgh Dr. Blair had been his tenant, and here, no doubt, had written some of those sermons and lectures which were to attain so wide a popularity, and then to sink into as deep a neglect. The time once was when Blair’s shrine would have drawn a crowd of pilgrims.

Hume and Boswell had for a short time been very near neighbours, as it was in the same block of buildings[407] that they lived. If the elder man had entertained the American patriot, Franklin, the younger had entertained the Corsican patriot, Pascal Paoli. He could boast, moreover, of the distinguished guests who thronged his house during Johnson’s two visits, both at his first coming and on his return from the Hebrides. Judges, and advocates who were destined one day to sit on the bench, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief, men and women of high birth, authors, divines, physicians, all came to see and hear the famous Englishman. We can picture to ourselves the sedan-chairs passing in under the low gateway, bearing the fine ladies and gentlemen who came to attend “the _levée_ which he held from ten o’clock in the morning till one or two.” The echo of the strong loud voice with the slow deliberate utterance still almost seems to sound in our ears as we wander about in this dreary spot. “I could not attend him,” writes Boswell, “being obliged to be in the Court of Session; but my wife was so good as to devote the greater part of the morning to the endless task of pouring out tea for my friend and his visitors.”

More than one caller, as he gazed on the huge frame, the scarred face, and the awkward strange movements of the man of whom they had heard so much, might have exclaimed with Lord Elibank, that “hardly anything seemed more improbable than to see Dr. Johnson in Scotland.” What Edinburgh said and thought of him we should greatly like to know. But no letters recording his visit seem to be extant. Even the very house has disappeared. Time, which has spared everything else in this old Court, has not spared it. More than thirty years ago it was burnt to the ground. We should have liked to wander about the rooms, and wonder which was the bedchamber that Mrs. Boswell, “to show all respect to the Sage,” so politely resigned to him; and where it was that Veronica, that precocious babe of four months, by wishing “to be held close to him, gave a proof from simple nature that his figure was not horrid.” Where, we should have asked, was the dinner given him at which Mrs. Boswell did her best “to aid wisdom and wit by administering agreeable sensations to the palate”? Where, too, were the carpets spread on which he let the wax of the candles drop, by turning them with their heads downwards when they did not burn bright enough? In what closet did Boswell keep his books, whence on Sunday, with pious purpose, Johnson took down Ogden’s Sermons, and retired with them to his own room? They did not, however, detain him long, and he soon rejoined the company. Which was the breakfast-room where Sir William Forbes introduced to him the blind scholar and poet, Dr. Blacklock? “Dear Dr. Blacklock, I am glad to see you,” he said, with a most humane complacency. “I looked on him with reverence,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale. It has all utterly passed away; Forbes himself has been Sir Walter Scott’s “lamented Forbes”[408] for more than fourscore years. All has passed away; not only the talk about Burke, and Garrick, and Hume, and Whitefield, and genius, and witchcraft, and the comparative difficulty of verse-making and dictionary-making; but even the very walls which might have caught it in its echoes. Where this famous old house once stood now stands a modern bank, contrasting but ill in its more elaborate architecture with the severe, and even stern, simplicity of the ancient buildings. Nevertheless we are at no loss to picture to ourselves the home of Hume and Boswell. Their _land_ occupied one half of the northern side of the Court; the other half, which no doubt corresponded with it in almost every respect, happily escaped the flames. It is so solidly built that if it is spared by the rage of fire and of modern improvement, it has little to fear from time. Its situation, looking down as it does with its northern front on the Mound, and the pleasant gardens in the valley below, has kept it from sinking in public estimation so much as most of the neighbouring buildings. It has indeed seen better days, but it has not lost all the outward signs of respectability; its panes are neither broken nor patched. The ground-floor, which was, we may assume, on the same plan as Boswell’s house, is occupied by a bookbinder,[409] who courteously showed me all over it. There were traces left in this busy workshop of past splendour, and I could see how handsome and spacious the rooms had once been. In the windows were deep recesses, where it must have been pleasant enough on a bright summer’s day to sit in the cool shade and look out over the heads of the elm trees waving below, across the sparkling waters of the Forth, on the hills of Fife in the far distance. A stone staircase, furnished with iron gates, led down from the level of the Court to the street four storeys below, where the foundations of this lofty pile are laid in the rock. The staircase had its occupant, for at one of the windows a mat-maker was busy at his trade.[410]

[Sidenote: MEMORIALS OF GREAT MEN.]

There is no memorial to remind passers-by of the men who have made James’s Court so famous. The stranger, as he climbs up the Lawnmarket to the Castle, is little likely to notice the obscure archway through which so gay and bright and learned a company was ever passing to and fro. In the public gardens Allan Ramsay, John Wilson and Adam Black have each their statue. Viscount Melville’s column lifts its head in St. Andrew’s Square, far above David Hume’s modest house, and in its inscription, in all probability, lies. The virtues and the glories of George IV. are lavishly commemorated. Even good Queen Charlotte is not suffered to be forgotten. In Chambers Street the name of the founder of _Chambers’ Journal_ is meant to live. On the finest site in all Edinburgh the insignificance of the fifth Duke of Buccleugh will struggle for immortality. We look in vain for the statue of David Hume, of Adam Smith, and of James Boswell. What street, what square, what bridge bear their names? Where does Edinburgh proudly boast to the stranger that she is the birth-place of the philosopher whose name is great in the history of the world, and of the biographer whose work has never been equalled? Where does she make it known that to her ancient city the author of the _Wealth of Nations_ retired to spend the closing years of his life and to die? If no nobler monuments can be raised, surely some bronze tablet or graven stone might keep fresh the memory of the spot where Adam Smith had his chamber, where Benjamin Franklin came to visit David Hume, where Rousseau was offered a shelter, and where James Boswell’s guests were Pascal Paoli and Samuel Johnson.

A STROLL THROUGH EDINBURGH.

It was in good company that Johnson, on the morning of Monday, August 16, “walked out to see some of the things which they had to show in Edinburgh,” for he was under the guidance of the historian of Scotland. “I love Robertson,” Johnson had said a few years earlier, “and I won’t talk of his book.” If Boswell had reported any part of this saying we may hope that it was only the first half, for he who neglects the author makes but a poor recompense by loving the man. At all events, Robertson was not troubled with diffidence, for at Holyrood “he fluently harangued” his companion on the scenes described in his History. No doubt he told many of those anecdotes for which Johnson that morning had declared his love as they breakfasted together, and took care not to attempt “to weave them into a system.” [Sidenote: THE LAWNMARKET.] As they passed into the Lawnmarket they had not before them that wide expanse which in the present day makes so noble an end to the High Street. The view was obstructed by the Weigh House, the Luckenbooths, the Tolbooth, and the Guard House.[411] At the Weigh House the boast, perhaps, was made that so great was the trade of the town that the public weighing-machine which was there kept brought in no less than a sum of £500 every year. At the Tolbooth and the Guard House, that “long low ugly building,” which looked like “a black snail crawling up the High Street,”[412] something, perhaps, was said of the Porteous riots. But the real story of the Heart of Mid-Lothian could only have been told them by that little child of scarce two years in the College Wynd, how the wild mob on that September night, seven-and-thirty years before, burnt down the massive gate of the jail, and dragged their wretched prisoner by torchlight to the gallows, and how Jeanie Deans could not tell a lie even to save her sister from a shameful death. There was no one but this bright-eyed boy who could have even pointed out in the Luckenbooths the stall where poor Peter Peebles and Paul Plainstanes had for years carried on “that great line of business as mercers and linendrapers,” which in the end led to a lawsuit that is famous all the world over. [Sidenote: PARLIAMENT HOUSE.] Having no one to tell them of all this they passed on through Parliament Close, “which new-fangled affectation has termed a square,”[413] to the Parliament House, which still showed “the grave grey hue that had been breathed over it by one hundred and fifty years,” and which was still free from the disgrace of “bright freestone and contemptible decorations.” The “sorrow and indignation,” which the restorer’s wanton changes aroused troubled a later generation.[414] Here it was that the Court of Session sat, the High Court of Justice of Scotland. It was in these August days empty of lawyers, for the Vacation had just begun; but Johnson on his return saw it also in term time, and thought “the pleading too vehement and too much addressed to the passions of the judges. It was not the Areopagus,” he said. Here Henry Erskine, the brother of the famous Chancellor, slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hands, who had introduced him to Johnson, saying that it was for the sight of his bear, and here Lord Auchinleck, seeing the great man enter, whispered to one of his brethren on the Bench that it was _Ursa Major_. In the Outer Hall had once sat the ancient Parliament of Scotland. Here it was that Lord Belhaven, at perhaps its last meeting, made that pathetic speech which drew tears from the audience. Here every day during term time there was a very Babel of a Court of Justice. Like Westminster Hall of old it was the tribunal of many judges, as well as the gathering ground of advocates, solicitors, suitors, witnesses, and idlers in general. Here it was that “the Macer shouted with all his well-remembered brazen strength of lungs: “Poor Peter Peebles _versus_ Plainstanes, _per_ Dumtoustie _et_ Tough:—Maister Da-a-niel Dumtoustie.”” Here it was that a famous but portly wag of later days, “Peter” Robinson, seeing Scott with his tall conical white head passing through, called out to the briefless crowd about the fire-place, “Hush, boys, here comes old Peveril—I see the Peak.” Scott looked round and replied, “Ay, ay, my man, as weel Peveril o’ the Peak ony day as Peter o’ the Painch” (paunch).[415] Here Thomas Carlyle, a student of the University, not yet fourteen years old, on the afternoon of the November day on which he first saw Edinburgh, “was dragged in to a scene” which he never forgot:

“An immense hall, dimly lighted from the top of the walls, and perhaps with candles burning in it here and there, all in strange _chiaroscuro_, and filled with what I thought (exaggeratively) a thousand or two of human creatures, all astir in a boundless buzz of talk, and simmering about in every direction, some solitary, some in groups. By degrees I noticed that some were in wig and black gown, some not, but in common clothes, all well dressed; that here and there on the sides of the hall, were little thrones with enclosures, and steps leading up, red-velvet figures sitting in said thrones, and the black-gowned eagerly speaking to them; advocates pleading to judges as I easily understood. How they could be heard in such a grinding din was somewhat a mystery. Higher up on the walls, stuck there like swallows in their nests, sate other humbler figures. These I found were the sources of certain wildly plangent lamentable kinds of sounds or echoes which from time to time pierced the universal noise of feet and voices, and rose unintelligibly above it, as if in the bitterness of incurable woe. Criers of the Court, I gradually came to understand. And this was Themis in her ‘Outer House,’ such a scene of chaotic din and hurlyburly as I had never figured before.”[416]

Here every year, on the evening of the King’s birthday, there was a scene of loyal riot. At the cost of the city funds, some fifteen hundred guests, on the invitation of the magistrates, “roaring, drinking, toasting, and quarrelling,” drank the royal healths to a late hour of the night. “The wreck and the fumes of that hot and scandalous night” tainted the air of the Court for a whole week.[417] From the Hall our travellers passed into the Inner House, where the fifteen judges sat together as “a Court of Review.” Like Carlyle, Johnson saw “great Law Lords this and that, great advocates, _alors célèbres_, as Thiers has it.” There were Hailes, and Kames, and Monboddo, on the Bench, and Henry Dundas, Solicitor General. The judges wore long robes of scarlet faced with white, but though their dignity was great, their salaries were small when compared with those paid to their brethren in Westminster Hall. The President had but £1,300 a year, and each of the fourteen Lords of Session but £700. Six of them, among whom was Boswell’s father, received each £300 more as a Commissioner of Justiciary.[418] The room, or rather “den,” in which they sat, “was so cased in venerable dirt that it was impossible to say whether it had ever been painted. Dismal though the hole was, the old fellows who had been bred there never looked so well anywhere else.”[419]