Chapter V: Introduction (4)

“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]

In the same great pile of buildings as the Law Courts is the Advocates’ Library, “of which Dr. Johnson took a cursory view.” He, no doubt, “respectfully remembered” there its former librarian, Thomas Ruddiman, “that excellent man and eminent scholar,” just as he remembered him a few days later at Laurencekirk, the scene of his labours as a schoolmaster. Perhaps a second time he “regretted that his farewell letter to the Faculty of Advocates when he resigned the office of their Librarian, was not, as it should have been, in Latin.” According to Ruddiman’s successor, David Hume, it was but “a petty office of forty or fifty guineas a year,” yet “a genteel one” too. When that great writer came to write his letter of resignation, he used the curtest of English, and took care to express his contempt for the Curators. Two or three years earlier they had censured him for buying some French books, which they accounted “indecent and unworthy of a place in a learned library,” and he had not forgiven them.[420] It was in the _Laigh_ (or Under) Parliament House beneath, in which at this time were deposited the records of Scotland, that Johnson, “rolling about in this old magazine of antiquities,” uttered those memorable words which have overcome the reluctance or the indolence of many an author: “A man may write at any time if he will set himself _doggedly_ to it.”

[Sidenote: ST. GILES’S CHURCH.]

It was but a step from the Parliament House to the great church of St. Giles. Perhaps Johnson went round by the eastern end, and mourned over the fate which had befallen Dunedin’s Cross less than twenty years before. A full century and more was to pass away before “the work of the Vandals” was undone, as far as it could be undone, by the pious affection of one of the greatest of Scotchmen.[421] Perhaps he turned to the west, and passed, little recking it, over the grave of John Knox. Even Boswell, Edinburgh-born though he was, did not know where the great Reformer lay buried, and a few days later asked where the spot was. “‘I hope in the highway,’ Dr. Johnson burst out.” In the pavement of Parliament Close, a “way of common trade,” a small stone inscribed “I. K. 1572,” marks where he rests. St. Giles’ was at this time “divided into four places of Presbyterian worship. ‘Come,’ said Johnson jocularly to Dr. Robertson, ‘let me see what was once a church.’” Writing to Mrs. Thrale the next day he said: “I told Robertson I wished to see the cathedral because it had once been a church.” Its “original magnificence,” the loss of which Boswell justly lamented, has been partly restored by the lavish changes of late years. Nevertheless, the student of history may in his turn lament that in this restoration there has of necessity disappeared much that was interesting. “There was swept away, with as much indifference as if it had been of yesterday, that plain, square, galleried apartment,” which, as the meeting-place of the General Assembly, “had beheld the best exertions of the best men in the Kingdom ever since the year 1640.”[422] Jenny Geddes and her stool, moreover, are reluctant to answer the summons of the imagination in a scene which she herself would scarcely have recognized. Johnson went into only one of the four divisions, the New, or the High Church, as it was beginning to be called. Here Blair was preaching those sermons which passed through editions almost innumerable, and now can be bought in their calf binding for a few pence at almost any bookstall. [Sidenote: SCOTCH CHURCHES.] The New Church was formed out of the ancient choir. In it were ranged the seats of the King, the judges, and the magistrates of the city. When Johnson saw it, “it was shamefully dirty. He said nothing at the time; but when he came to the great door of the Royal Infirmary, where upon a board was this inscription, ‘Clean your feet,’ he turned about slily and said, ‘There is no occasion for putting this at the doors of your churches.’” Pennant also had noticed “the slovenly and indecent manner in which Presbytery kept the houses of God. In many parts of Scotland,” he said, “our Lord seems still to be worshipped in a stable, and often in a very wretched one.”[423] Nevertheless, it seemed likely that some improvement would soon be made, and that orthodoxy and dirt would not be held inseparable companions. In one or two highly favoured spots the broom and scrubbing-brush had, perhaps, already made their appearance; for according to Smollett “the good people of Edinburgh no longer thought dirt and cobwebs essential to the house of God.”[424] It might still have been impossible “for the united rhetoric of mankind to prevail with Jack to make himself clean;”[425] yet example must at last have an effect. Scotchmen had travelled and had returned from their travels, and no doubt had brought back a certain love for decency and cleanliness even in churches. In one respect, it was noticed, they surpassed their neighbours. Their conduct during service was more becoming. “They did not make their bows and cringes in the middle of their very prayers as was done in England.” They always waited till the sermon was over and the blessing given before they looked round and made their civilities to their friends and persons of distinction.[426]

I inquired in vain when I was in Edinburgh for the Post-house Stairs, down which Johnson on leaving St. Giles was taken to the Cowgate. Together with so much that was ancient they have long since disappeared. He was now at the foot of the highest building in the town. As he turned round and looked upwards he saw a house that rose above him thirteen storeys high, being built like James’s Court on a steep slope. It has suffered the same fate as Boswell’s house, having been destroyed by fire more than sixty years ago.[427] [Sidenote: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY.] From the Cowgate Robertson led the way up the steep hill to the College of which he was the Principal. They passed through “that narrow dismal alley,” the College Wynd, famous to all time as the birthplace of Sir Walter Scott. Johnson would have been pleased indeed could he have known how that bright young genius would one day delight in his poems, and how the last line of manuscript that he was to send to the press would be a quotation from the _Vanity of Human Wishes_.[428] “Hæ miseriæ nostræ,” were the melancholy words which Robertson uttered as he showed his companion the mean buildings in which his illustrious University was lodged. Johnson, in the narrative of his tour, no doubt remembering what he saw both here and at St. Andrew’s, grieved over a nation which, “while its merchants or its nobles are raising palaces suffers its universities to moulder into dust.” Robertson, in an eloquent _Memorial_, had lately pleaded the cause of learning. The courts and buildings of the College were so mean, he said, that a stranger would mistake them for almshouses. Instead of a spacious quadrangle there were three paltry divisions, encompassed partly with a range of low and even of ruinous houses, and partly with walls which threatened destruction to the passers-by. Boswell tells of one portion of the wall which, bulging out, was supposed, like “Bacon’s mansion,” to “tremble o’er the head” of every scholar, being destined to fall when a man of extraordinary learning should go under it. It had lately been taken down. “They were afraid it never would fall,” said Johnson, glad of an opportunity to have a pleasant hit at Scottish learning. In spite of its poverty and the meanness of its buildings, such was the general reputation of the University, above all of the School of Medicine, that students flocked to it from all parts of Great Britain and Ireland, from the English settlements in North America and the West Indies, and even from distant countries in Europe. Their number at this time was not less than six or seven hundred; by 1789 it had risen to one thousand and ninety. The Principal did not allow himself to be soothed into negligence by this success. He grieved that “with a literary education should be connected in youth ideas of poverty, meanness, dirtiness, and darkness.” The sum of money which he asked for was not large in a country whose wealth was so rapidly increasing. For £6,500—not quite double the amount which he had been lately paid for his _History of Charles V._—sixteen “teaching rooms” could be provided, while £8,500 more would supply everything else that was needed. Yet it was not till 1789 that the foundation stone was laid of the New College of Edinburgh. Happily Robertson was spared to play his part on that great day. Preceded by the Mace, with the Professor of Divinity on his right hand, and the Professor of Church History on his left, followed by the rest of his colleagues according to seniority, and by the students, each man wearing a sprig of green laurel in his hat, he headed the procession of the University.[429]

However mean were the buildings in general, with the library Johnson was much pleased. Fifty years earlier a traveller had noticed that “the books in it were cloistered with doors of wire which none could open but the keeper, more commodious than the multitude of chains used in the English libraries.”[430] I was surprised to find that so late as 1723 the use of chains was generally continued in England. Yet about that time one of the Scotch exhibitioners at Balliol College reported that the knives and forks were chained to the tables in the Hall,[431] so that it was likely that at least as great care was taken with books of value. Johnson’s attention does not seem to have been drawn to an inscription over one of the doors, which the French traveller, Saint-Fond, read with surprise—MUSIS ET CHRISTO. Had he noticed it, it would scarcely have failed to draw forth some remark.

From the College the party went on to the Royal Infirmary. In the Bodleian Library I have found a copy of the _History and Statutes_ of that institution printed in 1749. In it is given a table of the three kinds of diet which the patients were to have—“low, middle, and full.” The only vegetable food allowed was oatmeal and barley-meal, rice and panado.[432] There was no tea, coffee, or cocoa. The only drink was ale, but in “low diet” it was not to be taken. It is to be hoped that the Infirmary was not under the same severe ecclesiastical discipline as the workhouse. There the first failure to attend Divine worship was to be followed by the loss of the next meal, while for the second failure the culprit was “to be denied victuals for a whole day.”[433]

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON. IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]

[Sidenote: HOLYROOD HOUSE.]

The last sight which Johnson was shown in his “running about Edinburgh” was the Abbey of Holyrood House, “that deserted mansion of royalty,” as Boswell calls it with a sigh. It was more the absence of a charwoman than of a king that was likely to rouse the regrets of an Englishman. “The stately rooms,” wrote Wesley, “are dirty as stables.”[434] Even the chapel was in a state of “miserable neglect.”[435] It was in Holyrood that Robertson “fluently harangued” on the scenes of Scottish history. In the room in which David Rizzio was murdered “Johnson was overheard repeating in a kind of muttering tone, a line of the old ballad, _Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night_:

‘And ran him through the fair body.’”

The mood in which he was when he made so odd a quotation was perhaps no less natural than Burns’s when he wrote:

“With awe-struck thought and pitying tears,
I view that noble, stately dome,
Where Scotia’s kings of other years
Famed heroes, had their royal home.”[436]

The Castle, that “rough, rude fortress,” was not visited by Johnson till his return in November. He owned that it was “a great place;” yet a few days after he affected to despise it, when Lord Elibank was talking of it with the natural elation of a Scotchman. “It would,” he said, “make a good prison in England.” Perhaps there was not so much affectation as Boswell thought, for Johnson believed, he said, that the ruins of some one of the castles which the English built in Wales would supply materials for all those which he saw beyond the Tweed.[437]

INCH KEITH (AUGUST 18).

[Sidenote: INCH KEITH.]

On the morning of Wednesday, August 18th, the travellers, accompanied by Mr. Nairne, an advocate, set out on their northern tour. They were attended by Boswell’s servant, Joseph Ritter, a Bohemian, “a fine stately fellow above six feet high, who had been over a great part of Europe, and spoke many languages. He was,” adds Boswell, “the best servant I ever saw. Dr. Johnson gave him this character, ‘Sir, he is a civil man, and a wise man.’” At Leith they took boat for Kinghorn on the other side of the Firth of Forth. In the passage Johnson observed the Island of Inch Keith, which, to his surprise, his companions had never visited, “though lying within their view, it had all their lives solicited their notice.” He flattered his pride as “a true-born Englishman” by reflecting, had it been as near London as it was to Edinburgh, “with what emulation of price a few rocky acres would have been purchased.” “I’d have this island,” he said. “I’d build a house, make a good landing-place, have a garden and vines, and all sorts of trees. A rich man of a hospitable turn here would have many visitors from Edinburgh.” By his wish they landed, putting in at a little bay on the north-west, the same “wild, stony little bay,” no doubt, into which Thomas Carlyle and Edward Irving ran their boat one summer evening more than forty years later. “We found the island,” writes Johnson, “a rock somewhat troublesome to climb, about a mile long and half a mile broad; in the middle were the ruins of an old fort, which had on one of the stones, ‘Maria Re. 1564.’ It had been only a blockhouse one storey high. The rock had some grass and many thistles, both cows and sheep were grazing. There was a spring of water. We pleased ourselves with being in a country all our own.” The ruins have long since disappeared; with the stones a light-house was built. How our travellers were affected by the beautiful scenery that was all around, if indeed they were affected, we are not told. For natural beauties Boswell hoped to be able some day “to force a taste.” In the description of visible objects he honestly owned he found a great difficulty. Johnson’s descriptions of scenery are almost all of the artificial school. Both men were far too wise to affect raptures which they did not feel. Happily the view that the chance wanderer sometimes sees in that lonely island has been sketched for us by the hands of a master. Carlyle thus describes what he saw: “The scene in our little bay, as we were about proceeding to launch our boat, seemed to me the beautifullest I had ever beheld. Sun about setting just in face of us, behind Ben Lomond far away. Edinburgh with its towers; the great silver mirror of the Frith girt by such a framework of mountains; cities, rocks, and fields and wavy landscapes on all hands of us; and reaching right under foot, as I remember, came a broad pillar as of gold from the just sinking sun; burning axle, as it were, going down to the centre of the world.”[438]

The weather was fine, so that our travellers had a pleasant crossing over “that great gulf” which Hume “regarded with horror and a kind of hydrophobia that kept him,” he said, from visiting Adam Smith at Kirkaldy.[439] In _Humphry Clinker_ Matthew Bramble had had so rough a passage, that when he was told that he had been saved “by the particular care of Providence,” he replied, “Yes, but I am much of the honest Highlander’s mind, after he had made such a passage as this. His friend told him he was much indebted to Providence. ‘Certainly,’ said Donald, ‘but by my saul, mon, I’se ne’er trouble Providence again so long as the Brig of Stirling stands.’”[440]

THE DRIVE TO ST. ANDREWS (AUGUST 18).

[Sidenote: POST-CHAISES AND ROADS.]

At Kinghorn, “a mean town,” which was said to consist chiefly of “horse-hirers and boatmen noted all Scotland over for their impudence and impositions,”[441] our travellers took a post-chaise for St. Andrews. A few years earlier Johnson would not have found there his favourite mode of conveyance. By the year 1758 post-chaises had only penetrated as far north as Durham.[442] He found the roads good, “neither rough nor dirty.” The absence of toll-gates, “afforded a southern stranger a new kind of pleasure.” He would not have rejoiced over this absence had he known that their want was supplied by the forced labour of the cottars. On these poor men was laid “an annual tax of six days’ labour for repairing the roads.”[443] Used as he was to the rapid succession of carriages and riders, and to the beautiful and varied scenery in the neighbourhood of London, he complained that in Scotland there was “little diversion for the traveller, who seldom sees himself either encountered or overtaken, and who has nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible boundaries, or are separated by walls of loose stone.” There were few of the heavy waggons which were seen on the roads in England. A small cart drawn by one little horse was the carriage in common use. “A man seemed to derive some degree of dignity and importance from the reputation of possessing a two-horse cart.” [Sidenote: KIRKALDY.] Three miles beyond Kinghorn they drove through Kirkaldy, “a very long town, meanly built,” where Adam Smith perhaps at that very time was taking his one amusement, “a long, solitary walk by the sea-side,” smiling and talking to himself and meditating his _Wealth of Nations_.[444] Here, too, Thomas Carlyle was to have “will and waygate” upon all his friend Irving’s books, and here “with greedy velocity” he was to read the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ at the rate of a volume a day. Along the beach he was to walk “in summer twilights, a mile of the smoothest sand, with one long wave coming on gently, steadily, and breaking in gradual explosion into harmless, melodious white at your hand all the way.”[445] Of all the scenery which Johnson saw, either here or on the rest of his drive, his description is of the briefest. “The whole country,” he wrote, “is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in the road between Kirkaldy and Cupar I passed for a few yards between two hedges.” Night, however, had come on before their journey was ended, for they had lost time at Inch Keith. They could not, moreover, have been driven at a fast pace, for between Kinghorn and St. Andrews, a distance of nearly thirty miles, there was no change of horses to be had.[446] They crossed, perhaps without knowing it, Magus Moor, where Archbishop Sharpe, “driving home from a council day,” was killed “by a party of furious men.”[447] In going over this same moor many years later, Sir Walter Scott, being moved, as he says, by the spirit to give a picture of the assassination, so told his tale that he “frightened away the night’s sleep of one of his fellow-travellers.”[448]

ST. ANDREWS (AUGUST 18-20).

[Sidenote: ST. ANDREWS.]

Coming as they did through the darkness to St. Andrews, they saw nothing of that “august appearance” which the seat of the most ancient of the Scotch universities presented from afar. “It appears,” said an early traveller, “much like Bruges in Flanders at a distance; its colleges and fine steeples making a goodly appearance.”[449] They arrived late, after a dreary drive, but “found a good supper at Glass’s Inn, and Dr. Johnson revived agreeably.” Who was Glass and which was his inn I could not ascertain. The old Scotch custom of calling a house not after its sign but its landlord, renders identification difficult. Wherever it was they found it full; but “by the interposition of some invisible friend,” to use Johnson’s words, “lodgings were provided at the house of one of the professors.” The invisible friend was a relation of that “most universal genius,” Dr. Arbuthnot, whom Johnson once ranked first among the writers in Queen Anne’s reign. Their host was Dr. Robert Watson, the author of the _History of Philip II. and Philip III. of Spain_, “an interesting, clear, well-arranged, and rather feeble-minded work,” as Carlyle described it.[450] [Sidenote: ST. LEONARD’S COLLEGE.] His house had formerly been part of St. Leonard’s College, but had been purchased by him at the time when that ancient institution, by being merged in St. Salvator’s, lost its separate existence. A traveller who had visited St. Andrews about the year 1723 saw the old cells of the monks, two storeys high, on the southern side of the college. “On the west was a goodly pile of buildings, but all out of repair.”[451] Wesley, who came to the town three years after Johnson, does not seem to have known how large a part of the old buildings had been converted into a private house, for he wrote that “what was left of St. Leonard’s College was only a heap of ruins.”[452] Of the inside of the ancient chapel Johnson could not get a sight:

“I was always, by some civil excuse, hindered from entering
it. A decent attempt, as I was since told, has been made to
convert it into a kind of green-house, by planting its area
with shrubs. This new method of gardening is unsuccessful; the
plants do not hitherto prosper. To what use it will next be
put, I have no pleasure in conjecturing. It is something, that
its present state is at least not ostentatiously displayed.
Where there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.”

The virtue was somewhat slow in coming. Saint-Fond, who got a peep into the chapel, inferred that it was used for a winter store-house for the carrots and turnips which grew in the kitchen-garden that surrounded it. It has of late years been cleared of rubbish and restored to decency, which, perhaps, is all the restoration that is desirable. Some shrubs and overhanging trees have been allowed to throw a graceful veil over man’s neglect. One strange sight the old monkish cells had witnessed earlier in the century. A man of liberal views had been elected Rector of the University. In his honour “the students made a bonfire at St. Leonard’s Gate, into which they threw some of the Calvinistic systems which they were enjoined to read.”[453] Not very many years before this innocent and even meritorious sacrifice was made, the terrible flames of religious persecution had blazed up in this city dedicated to piety and learning. It is possible that Johnson passed in the streets some aged man who in his childhood had seen a miserable woman burnt to death for witchcraft on the Witch Hill. So late as the seventh year of the present century a gentleman was living who had known a person who had witnessed this dreadful sight.[454]

In Dr. Watson’s house the two travellers “found very comfortable and genteel accommodation.” The host “wondered at Johnson’s total inattention to established manners;” but he does not seem to have let his wonder be discovered by his guest. “I take great delight in him,” said Johnson. How much delight Watson took in him we are not told. “He allowed him a very strong understanding;” and as well he might, for he heard some “good talk.” It was at his breakfast-table that Johnson proudly pointed out how authors had at length shaken themselves free of patrons. “Learning,” he said, “is a trade. We have done with patronage. If learning cannot support a man, if he must sit with his hands across till somebody feeds him, it is as to him a bad thing.” It was here, moreover, that he gave that amusing account of the change of manners in his lifetime. “I remember (said he) when all the _decent_ people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of.” That smoking had gone out seemed to him strange, for it was “a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity.”

[Sidenote: BUCHANAN’S HOUSE.]

The exact spot where he was so comfortably lodged is doubtful. In the Hebrides some of the chambers in which he slept are still known. In a University, where the traditions of a scholar should surely linger long, the very house has been forgotten. It is believed, however, that Dr. Watson occupied that part of the ancient building which had once been Buchanan’s residence. Some portion of that great scholar’s study still remains, having outlived both time and change. Yet that Johnson should not have been informed of a fact which to him would have been so interesting, or that being informed he should not have mentioned it, is indeed surprising. His admiration for Buchanan’s genius seems almost unbounded. If the city attracted him because it had once been archiepiscopal, so did the University, because in it Buchanan had once taught philosophy. “His name,” he adds, “has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits.” Sir Walter Scott loved him almost as much as Johnson. “He was his favourite Latin poet as well as historian.”[455]

Our travellers rose “much refreshed” from their fatigue, and to the enjoyment of a very fine day. They went forth to view the ruins not only of a cathedral, but almost of a city and a University. That it had once flourished as a city was shown by history: its ancient magnificence as the seat of a great archbishopric was witnessed by “the mournful memorials” which had escaped the hands of the devastator. Of its three Colleges only two were standing. It was “the skeleton of a venerable city,” said Smollett.[456] Many years earlier a traveller, applying to it Lord Rochester’s words, had described it as being “in its full perfection of decay.” Pennant, who visited it only the year before Johnson, on entering the West Port, saw a well-built street, straight, and of a vast length and breadth, lying before him; but it was so grass-grown, and so dreary a solitude, that it seemed as if it had been laid waste by pestilence.[457] Another traveller, who came a little later, praised “the noble wide street,” but lamented that most of the houses were “disfigured by what is termed a _fore-stair_—that is, an open staircase on the outside, carried in a zigzag manner across the front of the house.” Before most of them was heaped up a huge dunghill.[458] A young English student fresh from Eton, the grandson of Bishop Berkeley, who entered the University about the year 1778, on seeing “this dreary deserted city, wept to think that he was to remain there three long years.” So fond nevertheless did he become of the place that “he shed more tears at leaving than at entering.”[459] Saint-Fond saw grass growing in all the streets: “Tout y est triste, silencieux; le peuple, y vivant dans l’ignorance des arts et du commerce, offre l’image de l’insouciance et de la langueur.”[460] [Sidenote: GRASS-GROWN STREETS.] I was told by an old inhabitant that not a single new house was built till after the year 1851, and that not long before that time sheep might be seen feeding in the grass-grown streets. Our travellers were touched by the general gloom. “It was,” said Boswell, “somewhat dispiriting to see this ancient archiepiscopal city now sadly deserted.” “One of its streets,” wrote Johnson, “is now lost; and in those that remain there is the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation.” This loss of a street seems to have been imaginary. He was speaking, no doubt, of the road known under the name of _The Scores_, which runs in front of the Castle, and follows the line of the coast. But along its course neither pavements nor foundations have ever been discovered.[461] Nevertheless the desolation was very great. [Sidenote: THE CASTLE.] Over one ruin, however, a good man might have justly exulted. In the archbishops’ castle on the edge of the sea is shown the dreadful pit in which the unhappy prisoner, far below the level of the ground, spent his weary days in wretchedness and darkness, listening to the beating of the waves. Here ofttimes he waited for the hour to come when he should be raised by a rope to the surface, as if he were a bucket of water, and not a man, and dragged off to die before the people. Sometimes those poor eyes, grown weak by a darkness which was never broken, of a sudden had to face, not only the light of day, but the blaze of the torch which was to kindle the martyr’s pile. Thinking on all this—on Patrick Hamilton, on Henry Forrest, on George Wishart, and on Walter Milne, who for their faith suffered death by fire at St. Andrews—who does not rejoice that this dismal den was shattered to pieces, and that where once “an atheous priest” made the good tremble by his frown, now on the pleasant sward innocent children play about, and strangers from afar idly dream an hour away?

DOCKS.

ST. ANDREWS.]

None of these thoughts came into the minds of the two travellers. They did not see this dreadful dungeon, for it was hidden beneath the rubbish of the ruined walls. The sight of it would, I hope, have moved Johnson to write otherwise than he did. Had he looked down into its gloomy depths, he would scarcely have said that “Cardinal Beaton was murdered by the ruffians of reformation.” Never surely was a more righteous sentence executed than that whereby this murderer of George Wishart, in the very room where, lolling on his velvet cushion, he had looked forth on the martyr’s sufferings, was himself put to death.

[Sidenote: THE CATHEDRAL.]

With far different feelings are we animated as we look at “the poor remains of the stately Cathedral.” If we do not grieve for the rooks, nevertheless we mourn over the wild folly which struck down so glorious a rookery. Would that that fair sight still caught the sailor’s eye which met John Knox’s gaze when, “hanging tired over his oar in the French galley, he saw the white steeples of St. Andrews rising out of the sea in the mist of the summer morning!”[462] Desolate as is the scene of ruin now, it was far more desolate when Johnson saw it. The ground lay deep in rubbish. The few broken pillars which were left standing were almost hidden in the ruins heaped up around them. The Cathedral until very lately had been made a common quarry, “and every man had carried away the stones who fancied that he wanted them.” Now all is trim. The levelled ground, the smooth lawn, the gravelled paths, the gently sloping banks, the trees and the shrubs, all bear witness to man’s care for the venerable past, and to his reverence for the dead who still find their last resting-place by the side of their forefathers. The wantonness of the destruction, however, mocks at repair. The work was too thoroughly done by those fierce reformers, and by the quiet quarrymen of after ages. In all the cities of Scotland there were craftsmen, but it was in Glasgow alone that they rose to save their beloved Cathedral. Yet everywhere the people should have felt—to use Johnson’s homely words—as, “wrapt up in contemplation,” he surveyed these scenes—that “differing from a man in doctrine is no reason why you should pull his house about his ears.” We may exclaim, as Wesley exclaimed at Aberbrothick, when he was told that the zealous reformers burnt the Abbey down, “God deliver us from reforming mobs!”[463]

[Sidenote: TALK IN THE CLOISTERS.]

In the ruined cloisters as our travellers paced up and down, while the old walls gave “a solemn echo” to their steps and to Johnson’s strong voice, he talked about retirement from the world. For such a discourse there could not easily have been found a more fitting scene.

“I never read of an hermit (he said) but in imagination I kiss
his feet: never of a monastery, but I could fall on my knees
and kiss the pavement. But I think putting young people there,
who know nothing of life, nothing of retirement, is dangerous
and wicked. It is a saying as old as Hesiod—

‘Ἑργα νέων, βουλαί δε μέσων, εὐχαὶ δὲ γερόντων.’[464]

That is a very noble line: not that young men should not pray,
or old men not give counsel, but that every season of life has
its proper duties. I have thought of retiring, and have talked
of it to a friend; but I find my vocation is rather to active
life.”

Here, too, it was a different scene upon which he looked from that which meets our view. The gravestones which are now set against the walls of the cloisters were then buried beneath the rubbish of the cathedral. On the other side of this wall, in the grounds of the priory, were situated those “two vaults or cellars” where our travellers found a strange inmate.

“In one of them (writes Johnson) lives an old woman, who claims
an hereditary residence in it, boasting that her husband was
the sixth tenant of this gloomy mansion in a lineal descent,
and claims by her marriage with this lord of the cavern
an alliance with the Bruces. Mr. Boswell staid a while to
interrogate her, because he understood her language; she told
him that she and her cat lived together; that she had two sons
somewhere, who might perhaps be dead; that when there were
quality in the town notice was taken of her, and that now
she was neglected, but did not trouble them. Her habitation
contained all that she had; her turf for fire was laid in
one place and her balls of coal dust in another, but her bed
seemed to be clean. Boswell asked her if she never heard any
noises, but she could tell him of nothing supernatural, though
she often wandered in the night among the graves and ruins;
only she had sometimes notice by dreams of the death of her
relations.”

I made as diligent an inquiry as I could after this kinswoman of the royal family of Scotland, but all in vain.

“The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things.”

The memory has been preserved of “some cellar-looking places,” but no tradition of human habitation has come down to our time.