Chapter VI: Introduction (5)

“Dr. Johnson wanted to mount the steeples (writes Boswell),
but it could not be done. One of them, which he was told was
in danger, he wished not to be taken down; ‘for (said he) it
may fall on some of the posterity of John Knox; and no great
matter.’”

[Sidenote: ST. RULE’S TOWER.]

Among the posterity was to be born eight-and-twenty years later a little girl, destined to become famous as the wife of Thomas Carlyle.[465] What was the hindrance to the ascent of St. Rule’s Tower I could not ascertain. The staircase, which is perfect, has in no part a modern appearance, but nevertheless, it is possible that some of the steps were missing. Saint-Fond, nevertheless, went up it not long after Johnson’s visit. Sir Walter Scott, a few years before his death, visiting the ruins, wrote that he had not been strong enough to climb the tower.

“When before did I remain sitting below when there was a
steeple to be ascended? I sat down on a grave-stone, and
recollected the first visit I made to St. Andrews, now
thirty-four years ago. What changes in my feelings and my
fortunes have since then taken place!—some for the better,
many for the worse. I remembered the name I then carved in
runic characters on the turf beside the Castle Gate, and I
asked why it should still agitate my heart.”[466]

As we wander among these ancient ruins it is pleasant to think not only on the days when the cathedral stood in all its magnificence, and on those other days when the wild mob raved through it, but also on old Samuel Johnson, wrapped up in contemplation or preaching about retirement, and on Walter Scott resting on a gravestone and dreaming of his first love. We may pause, too, for one moment in the old chapel beneath the tower, at the spot where that good man and good antiquary Robert Chambers lies in everlasting rest. From the top of the tower I looked with pleasure on the long row of young trees planted along the main street. The reproach of bareness will not long hang over the town. Indeed, much had been done to remove it by an earlier generation, for this noble street was adorned not many years ago by a fine group of trees. Unfortunately a reforming provost arose, who swept them away. Near the cathedral I noticed an inscription which might have called forth Johnson’s sarcastic wit had he chanced to see it. It bore the date of 1712, and was in memory of “John Anderson who was Minister of the Gospel of St. Andrews.”

[Sidenote: THE PROFESSORS’ DINNER.]

While the travellers were strolling about “dinner was mentioned. ‘Ay, ay,’ said Johnson. ‘Amidst all these sorrowful scenes I have no objection to dinner.’” They were to be the guests of the professors, who entertained them at one of the inns.

“An ill-natured story was circulated (says Boswell) that,
after grace was said in English, Johnson, with the greatest
marks of contempt, as if he had held it to be no grace in an
university, would not sit down till he had said grace aloud, in
Latin. This would have been an insult indeed to the gentlemen
who were entertaining us. But the truth was precisely thus. In
the course of conversation at dinner, Dr. Johnson, in very good
humour, said, ‘I should have expected to have heard a Latin
grace, among so many learned men: we had always a Latin grace
at Oxford. I believe I can repeat it.’”

This grace had been written by the learned Camden for Pembroke College, “to which,” to use Johnson’s own words, “the zeal or gratitude of those that love it most can wish little better than that it may long proceed as it began.”

In the afternoon they went to see the monument to Archbishop Sharpe. His great granddaughter they met at supper. Saint-Fond, confounding him with Cardinal Beaton, says: “Il parâit que les parens du Cardinal Beaton n’ont pas voulu déguiser la paternité du saint archevêque, puisque sa fille est représentée toute en pleurs, les bras tendus vers son père.”[467]

The two colleges which formed the University greatly interested Johnson. The natural advantages of St. Andrews for a seat of learning had been pointed out by an earlier traveller, who maintained that it had the best situation he had ever seen for an University, “being out of all common roads, and having fine downs or links, as they call them, for exercising the scholars.”[468] The golfers who now throng the links and boast that when professors by their learning could not save the ancient city from sinking into decay, they by their idleness have lifted it into prosperity, must have been numerous even in Johnson’s time. Of all the old manufactures, that of golf-balls alone was left, and it maintained, or rather helped to destroy, several people. “The trade,” says Pennant, “is commonly fatal to the artists, for the balls are made by stuffing a great quantity of feathers into a leathern case, by help of an iron rod with a wooden handle pressed against the breast, which seldom fails to bring on a consumption.”[469] To Johnson, though he makes no mention of the Links, “St. Andrews seemed to be a place eminently adapted to study and education.” [Sidenote: A DECLINING UNIVERSITY.] Nevertheless, he had to grieve over a declining university. The fault was not, he said, in the professors; the expenses of the students, moreover, were very moderate. For about fifteen pounds, board, lodging, and instruction were provided for the session of seven months for students of the highest class. Those of lower rank were charged less than ten. Percival Stockdale, who was there in 1756, says that “for a good bedroom, coals, and the attendance of a servant, he paid one shilling a week.”[470] At this period an Oxford commoner, Johnson says, required a hundred a year and a petty scholarship “to live with great ease.”[471] To anyone who could pay for what he bought in ready money, living was made cheaper by the system of giving a discount of a shilling in the pound. A Scotch gentleman who resided much in England finding that this was not done in that country, “was in the habit when he purchased anything of putting the cash in a piece of paper, on which he wrote what it was to pay. This he kept in his desk twelve months, saying that the English traders are a set of rascals.”[472] The poorer Scotch students, however, had to bear great privations. “The miserable holes which some of them inhabit,” writes a young English traveller, “their abstemiousness and parsimony, their constant attendance to study, their indefatigable industry, border on romance.”[473] At St. Andrews they often were too poor to buy candles, and had to study by fire-light.[474] In spite of the extraordinary cheapness of the life their numbers were dwindling. They did not at this time exceed a hundred, says Johnson. Three years later Wesley was told that there were only about seventy.[475] “To the sight of archiepiscopal ruins,” Johnson was reconciled, he said, by the remoteness of the calamity which had befallen them. “Had the University been destroyed two centuries ago we should not have regretted it; but to see it pining in decay and struggling for life fills the mind with mournful images and ineffectual wishes.” Some improvement, nevertheless, had of late been made. [Sidenote: ST. SALVATOR’S COLLEGE.] Defoe, in the year 1727, had described the whole building of St. Salvator’s College “as looking into its grave.”[476] The account given by Boswell of the fabric is much more cheerful. “The rooms for students,” he writes, “seemed very commodious, and Dr. Johnson said the chapel was the neatest place of worship he had seen.” Nevertheless, at the beginning of this century some of the lecture-rooms were described as being places “in which a gentleman would be ashamed to lodge his hacks or his terriers.”[477] It was fortunate for the reputation of the College that our two travellers had not visited it earlier in the summer, otherwise they would have had to report a disgraceful sight which three years later shocked John Wesley. It was soon after the beginning of the Long Vacation that he was there, before the glaziers had repaired the wreck which marked the end of the yearly course. It was the custom, he was told, for the students to break all the windows before they left. “Where,” asks Wesley, indignantly, “are their blessed Governors in the mean time? Are they all fast asleep?”[478] The young Etonian, Bishop Berkeley’s grandson, had the merit of putting an end to this bad practice. [Sidenote: “WINDOW-CROONS.”] On entrance he was required to deposit a crown for window-money; when, model of virtue as he was, he objected that he had never yet broken a window in his life, and was not likely to begin, he was assured that he would before he left St. Andrews. The College porter, who collected “these window-_croons_,” told him of a poor student who had shed tears on being called on to pay. His father, a cottar, had sold one of his three cows to find money for his education at the university, and had sent him up with a large tub of oatmeal, a pot of salted butter, and five shillings in his pocket. Sixpence of this money had already been spent, and the rest the porter took.[479] When the window-breaking time came on, and Berkeley was summoned to take his part in the riot, he refused. As a boy at Eton, he said, though sometimes with more wine in his head than was good for him, he had never performed such a valiant feat, and he was not therefore going to begin as a young man. His comrades yielded to his remonstrances, and the windows were no longer broken.[480]

At St. Mary’s College Johnson was shown the fine library which had been finished within the last few years. Dr. Murison, the Principal, was abundantly vain of it, for he seriously said to him, “You have not such a one in England.” Johnson, though he has his laugh at the Doctor for hoping “to irritate or subdue his English vanity,” yet admits that if “it was not very spacious, it was elegant and luminous.” It is not, of course, to be compared with the largest libraries at Oxford. “If a man has a mind to prance” it is not at St. Andrews, but at Christ Church and All Souls, that he must study.[481] Nevertheless it confers great dignity on the University, and with its 120,000 volumes there is no English College that it would disgrace. Murison’s vanity had therefore some excuse. He was, however, a man “barely sufficient” for the post which he held. Over his slips in Latin the lads sometimes made merry. In the Divinity Hall he one day rebuked a student for delivering a discourse which was too high-flown and poetical. “Lord help him, poor man!” said the indignant youngster, “He knows no better.”[482]

[Sidenote: A FINE PLANE TREE.]

On the second day of our travellers’ stay “they went,” says Boswell, “and saw Colonel Nairne’s garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree.[483] Unluckily the Colonel said there was but this and another large tree in the country.[484] This assertion was an excellent cue for Dr. Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it.” The Colonel’s father, Lord Nairne, had been “out in the ’45,” while the son, who fought in the King’s army, had been sent to batter down the old castle of his forefathers. George II. wished to reward his fidelity with the command of a regiment, but was hindered by the Duke of Cumberland, “who told the King that it was impossible that a man who had suffered so much could ever forget or forgive it.”[485] His garden and grotto were at the back of the Chapel. The grotto has disappeared with its “petrified stocks of trees,” unless perchance some remains of it are seen in a small building, which looks like a private chapel, and which might have been transformed by that ingenious collector of curiosities, the Colonel. The plane tree survived till about the beginning of the century. An old gentleman still living was told by his grandfather that in the branches a wooden platform had been built, on which tea-parties were held.[486] I remember seeing in my boyhood a similar platform in a large willow-tree overhanging Isaac Walton’s sedgy Lea. That the good people of St. Andrews have not in their traditions made Johnson drink a dozen or two cups of tea in this airy summer-house is a proof either of their truthfulness or of the sluggishness of their imagination.

[Sidenote: A REVIVING UNIVERSITY.]

Every Scotchman, it was said long ago, thought it his duty once in his life to visit “the city of the scarlet gown” and to see the ruins of the great cathedral.[487] No longer, happily, is the mind of the pilgrim “filled with mournful images and ineffectual wishes;” no longer does he see “a University pining in decay and struggling for life;” no longer does he wander through grass-grown streets, listening to the sound of his own solitary steps. The town is thriving and animated; the University sees the number of its students steadily increasing. It had long been depressed by poverty; but a noble endowment happily has this very year[488] fallen to its lot. If it can never hope to attain to those stately avenues and lawns and gardens and buildings, as beautiful as they are venerable, which are the boast of Oxford, nevertheless in the bracing pureness of its air, in its fine situation on the shores of the northern sea, in its seclusion from that bustle which distracts the student’s life, and from that luxury which too often makes poverty, however honest, hang its head, it has advantages which are not enjoyed by any other of our Universities.

LEUCHARS AND ABERBROTHICK. (AUGUST 20).

[Sidenote: LEUCHARS CHURCH.]

Johnson, closing his description of St. Andrews with his lament over its declining University, goes on to say like a wise man:—“As we knew sorrow and wishes to be vain, it was now our business to mind our way.” Perhaps, as he wrote these words he had in his memory two lines of Matthew Green, though they were originally used of quitting, not what was painful, but what was pleasant—

“Though pleased to see the dolphins play,
I mind my compass and my way.”[489]

He and Boswell started about noon for Montrose on the other side of the Firth of Tay, a distance of a little over forty miles, but with good reason made a halt at Leuchars, on observing the fine old Norman church.[490] They were fortunate enough to see it before it was “restored” for nothing ancient remains but the apse and chancel. The new portion in the interior is ugly in the most approved Scottish fashion; in the outside it would be insignificant were it not added as a vast excrescence to the ancient building. It stands on a little hill at the end of the village, with the churchyard round it falling away on the southern side in steep slopes to the road. Hard by are some well-grown trees round the Manse where Boswell waited on the aged minister, a very civil old man, to learn what he could. He was told that the church was supposed to have stood eight hundred years. St. Andrews certainly can show nothing so ancient. The village is built solidly enough of stone, but seems careless of pleasing the eye. There are no little gardens before the houses, no roses trained up the walls, scarcely any flowers in the windows. “Take care of the beautiful, the useful will take care of itself” has not been a gospel sounded in Scottish ears.

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

The road to the Tay, which Boswell enlivened by leading Johnson to discuss the doctrine of transubstantiation, lay through a pleasant undulating country that bears luxuriant crops and at the present time is no longer wanting in trees. Their chaise was taken across the Firth in a ferry-boat at a charge of four shillings. How Johnson, who always delighted in what he called “the accommodations of life,” would have exulted in the great bridge which now spans the flood! He would have noticed too with pleasure the long avenue of young trees planted along the bank. [Sidenote: ABERBROTHICK.] Passing through Dundee, “a dirty despicable town” as he describes it, but now the seat of a vast commerce, they came about the close of the day to the ruined abbey of Aberbrothick.[491] The sight of these fragments of “stupendous magnificence” struck Johnson perhaps more than anything which he saw on the whole of his tour. “I should scarcely have regretted my journey,” he said, “had it afforded nothing more than the sight of Aberbrothick.” John Wesley declared that he “knew nothing like the Abbey in all North Britain. I paced it and found it an hundred yards long. The breadth is proportionable. Part of the west-end which is still standing shows it was full as high as Westminster Abbey.”[492] It had been left in much the same state of neglect as the Cathedral of St. Andrews. Boswell, “whose inquisitiveness was seconded by great activity,” wanted to climb one of the towers. “He scrambled in at a high window, but found the stairs within broken, and could not reach the top.” The entrance to the other tower they could not discern, and as the night was gathering upon them he gave up the attempt. Not clearly remembering Johnson’s account, I told the old man who shows the Abbey that I had read in an old book that a hundred years and more ago the staircase was broken down. “Then they _leed_,” he answered angrily, indignant for its reputation for antiquity. I learnt from him that an ancient inn, which had been recently pulled down, had been found to have been built of the hewn stones taken from the Abbey. In the ruins no doubt for many a long year the town had had its quarry. Johnson noticed one room of which he could not conjecture the use, “as its elevation was very disproportionate to its area.” [Sidenote: THE CHAPTER HOUSE.] I was told that it was the Chapter House, but my informant, a queer little urchin who acted as under-guide, was not trustworthy, for he informed me that the ruins had been caused by a fire in which the Abbey was burnt down a thousand years ago. In this room I found hanging on the wall likenesses of Mary Queen of Scots and of Pope Pius IX. Surely the bitterness of the Reformation has passed away even in Scotland.

[Sidenote: RUINS AND ADVERTISEMENTS.]

The grounds are still used as a graveyard. Here and elsewhere in Scotland I noticed in the inscriptions that the English term _wife_ is slowly supplanting the old Scotch term _spouse_. On one side of the great gateway two ugly arches have been lately built as entrances to pompous family burial places. These excrescences should surely be removed and the dead left to their quiet insignificance. On the outside, underneath a lofty wall, a pleasant bowling-green has been laid out for public enjoyment, with flower borders running round. The town was keeping a public holiday the day I was there, and the ground was thronged with players and spectators. I was sorry to see in many places that ivy in the true cockney spirit has been trained up the ruins. Unless the strong sea-breezes, which cut off the tops of the trees as soon as they show their heads too high, come to the rescue, it will in time hide the dark red sandstone beneath a uniform mantle of green. Though the ruins are now cared for, and the ground cleared of the long grass and weeds which hindered Johnson from tracing the foundations, nevertheless the lofty wall close to the main entrance is disgraced by huge advertisements. As the stranger approaches the venerable pile from the High Street he gives one angry thought to the Town Council which leases it to the dealers in sewing machines, in blue, and in Irish whisky for advertising their wares. “Where there is yet shame there may in time be virtue.” Would that this protest of mine may rouse a feeling of shame in the unworthy guardians of so glorious a ruin!

MONTROSE, LAURENCEKIRK AND MONBODDO (AUGUST 20-21).

[Sidenote: MONTROSE.]

The road along which Johnson and Boswell drove as they journeyed from Dundee through Arbroath to Montrose, is described by Defoe as a “pleasant way through a country fruitful and bespangled, as the sky in a clear night with stars of the biggest magnitude, with gentlemen’s houses, thick as they can be supposed to stand with pleasure and conveniency.”[493] Our travellers in the latter part of the drive saw nothing of all this, for the sun had set before they left the great Abbey; it was not till eleven at night that they arrived at Montrose. There they found but a sorry inn, where, writes Boswell, “I myself saw another waiter put a lump of sugar with his fingers into Dr. Johnson’s lemonade, for which he called him ‘rascal!’ It put me in great glee that our landlord was an Englishman. I rallied the Doctor upon this and he grew quiet.” The town Johnson praised as “neat”—“neat” last century stood very high among the terms of commendation, though it is now supplanted by “elegant” among Americans, and by “nice” among English people. At the time of the Rebellion of 1745, the townsfolk had been described as “very genteel, but disaffected.”[494] To the clerk of the English chapel Johnson gave “a shilling extraordinary, saying, ‘He belongs to an honest church.’” He had the great merit also of keeping his church “clean to a degree unknown in any other part of Scotland,” so that his shilling was well earned.

From Montrose the road led through a country rich with an abundant harvest that was almost ripe for the sickle, but bare of everything but crops. Even the hedges, said Johnson, were of stone. Boswell calls this a ludicrous description, but it could have been easily defended as good Scotch, for in the _Scots Magazine_ for January of the previous year, we read of “the stone hedges of Scotland.”[495] It is strange that Johnson had not noticed these roughly-built walls in Northumberland, for in the northern part of that county, according to Pennant, “hedges were still in their infancy.”[496] [Sidenote: LAURENCEKIRK.] At Laurencekirk our travellers stopped to dine, and “respectfully remembered that great grammarian Ruddiman,” who had spent four years there as schoolmaster. More than seventy years before their visit, Dr. Pitcairne, the author of that Latin epitaph on Dundee which Dryden translated, being weather-bound at the village inn, “inquired if there were no persons who could interchange conversation and partake of his dinner.” The hostess mentioned Ruddiman. He came, pleased Pitcairne, and was by him brought to Edinburgh.[497] [Sidenote: A VILLAGE LIBRARY.] Francis Garden, one of the Scotch judges, under the title of Lord Gardenston, the laird and almost the founder of this thriving village, “had furnished the inn with a collection of books, that travellers might have entertainment for the mind as well as the body. Dr. Johnson praised the design, but wished there had been more books, and those better chosen.” The inn still stands with the library adjoining it. Round the room is hanging a series of portraits in French chalk of Gardenston’s “feuars,” or tenants, who, after the laird, were the chief people of the place when Johnson and Boswell passed through. Many of the books remain on the shelves, though some have been lost through carelessness or the dishonesty of travellers. There are among them a few works of light literature such as Dryden’s _Virgil_, and _Gil Blas_ in French, but the solid reading which most of them afford makes us think with a feeling of respect that almost amounts to awe, of the learning of the Scotch travellers in those good old days. Tavern chairs were no thrones of human felicity in Laurencekirk if such works as the following were commonly perused by those who chanced to fill them:

Magno’s _Observations on Anatomy_, in Latin.
Keill’s _Introduction to the Study of Astronomy_.
_Aristophanes_, with Latin notes.
Boerhaave’s _Commentaries on the Aphorisms of Diseases,
naturalized into English_.
Tull’s _Horse-hoeing Husbandry_.
Watt’s _Logic_.
Newton’s _Principia_.
Clarke’s _Sermons_.
_Machiavelli_, in Italian.[498]

In Marischal College, Aberdeen, there is a portrait of Lord Gardenston in his judge’s robes. He has a somewhat conceited look, such as we might expect in a man who “wrote a pamphlet upon his village, as if he had founded Thebes,” and who provided such improving reading for his weary fellow-creatures.

[Sidenote: LORD MONBODDO.]

A mile or two off the road from Laurencekirk to Aberdeen lived the famous old Scotch judge, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. “I knew,” wrote Boswell, “that he and Dr. Johnson did not love each other; yet I was unwilling not to visit his Lordship, and was also curious to see them together. I mentioned my doubts to Dr. Johnson, who said he would go two miles out of his way to see Lord Monboddo.” The two men had not much in common except their love of learning, and their precision of speech. Monboddo, according to Foote, was an Elzevir edition of Johnson. In a letter to Mrs. Thrale Johnson thus describes him:

“He has lately written a strange book about the origin of
language, in which he traces monkeys up to men, and says that
in some countries the human species have tails like other
beasts. He inquired for these long-tailed men of Banks, and
was not well-pleased that they had not been found in all his
peregrinations. He talked nothing of this to me, and I hope we
parted friends; for we agreed pretty well, only we disputed in
adjusting the claims of merit between a shopkeeper of London
and a savage of the American wildernesses. Our opinions were,
I think, maintained on both sides without full conviction;
Monboddo declared boldly for the savage, and I perhaps for that
reason sided with the citizen.”

Johnson a few years earlier had contrasted Monboddo with Rousseau, “who talked nonsense so well that he must know he was talking nonsense;” whereas, he added, “chuckling and laughing, ‘I am afraid Monboddo does not know that he is talking nonsense.’” He was undoubtedly a man of great learning, but he was almost destitute of the critical faculty. In the six volumes of his _Ancient Metaphysics_ we come across such strange passages as the following:

“Not only are there tailed men extant, but men such as the
ancients describe Satyrs have been found, who had not only
tails, but the feet of goats, and horns on their heads.... We
have the authority of a father of the Church for a greater
singularity of the human form, and that is of men without heads
but with eyes in their breasts.... There is another singularity
as great or greater than any I have hitherto mentioned, and
that is of men with the heads of dogs.”[499]

After stating his readiness to believe that “a tame and gentle animal” once existed, “having the head of a man and the body of a lion,” he continues:

“The variety of nature is so great that I am convinced of the
truth of what Aristotle says, that everything exists, or did at
some time exist, which is possible to exist.”[500]

The orang-outang he describes as being “of a character mild and gentle, affectionate, too, and capable of friendship, with the sense also of what is decent and becoming.”[501] The ancients, he stoutly maintained, were in every respect better and stronger than their descendants. He shocked Hannah More by telling her that “he loved slavery upon principle.” When she asked him “how he could vindicate such an enormity, he owned it was because Plutarch justified it.”[502] In one respect he was wise in following the example of the ancients. In an age when bathing was very uncommon even among the wealthy, he constantly urged the daily use of the cold bath. He reminded “our fine gentlemen and ladies that the Otaheite man, Omai, who came from a country where the inhabitants bathed twice a day,” complained of the offensive smell of all the people of England.[503] It was believed, however, that Monboddo impaired the health of his children by the hardy treatment to which he exposed them. He despised Johnson because “he had compiled a dictionary of a barbarous language, a work which a man of real genius rather than undertake would choose to die of hunger.”[504] In the latter part of his life he used every year to pay a visit to London, and he always went on horseback, even after he had passed his eightieth year. “A carriage, a vehicle that was not in common use among the ancients, he considered as an engine of effeminacy and sloth. To be dragged at the tail of horses seemed in his eyes to be a ludicrous degradation of the genuine dignity of human nature. In Court he never sat on the Bench with the other judges, but within the Bar, on the seat appropriated for Peers.”[505] Yet with all his singularities he was a fine old fellow. There was no kinder landlord in all Scotland. While around him the small farms were disappearing, and farmers and cottagers were making room for sheep, it was his boast that on his estate no change had been made. Neither he nor his father before him had ever turned off a single cottager.

“One of my tenants (he wrote) who pays me no more than £30
of rent has no less than thirteen cottagers living upon his
farm. I have on one part of my estate seven tenants, each of
whom possesses no more than three acres of arable land, and
some moorish land for pasture, and they pay me no more than
twelve shillings for each acre, and nothing for the moor. I
am persuaded I could more than double the rent of their land
by letting it off to one tenant; but I should be sorry to
increase my rent by depopulating any part of the country; and
I keep these small tenants as a monument of the way in which I
believe a great part of the Lowlands was cultivated in ancient
times.”[506]

He befriended Burns, who repaid his kindness by celebrating his daughter’s beauty in his _Address to Edinburgh_, and by the elegy which he wrote on her untimely death. In a note to _Guy Mannering_ Sir Walter Scott describes his supper parties, “where there was a circulation of excellent Bordeaux in flasks garlanded with roses, which were also strewed on the table after the manner of Horace. The best society, whether in respect of rank or literary distinction, was always to be found in St. John’s Street, Canongate. The conversation of the excellent old man; his high, gentleman-like, chivalrous spirit; the learning and wit with which he defended his fanciful paradoxes; the kind and liberal spirit of his hospitality, must render these _noctes cænæque_ dear to all who, like the author (though then young), had the honour of sitting at his board.”

[Sidenote: MONBODDO HOUSE.]

Boswell’s man-servant, who had been sent on to ascertain whether Lord Monboddo was at home, awaited the travellers’ arrival at the turn in the road, with the news that they were expected to dinner.

“We drove,” says Boswell, “over a wild moor. It rained, and the
scene was somewhat dreary. Dr. Johnson repeated with solemn
emphasis Macbeth’s speech on meeting the witches.... Monboddo
is a wretched place, wild and naked, with a poor old house;
though, if I recollect right, there are two turrets, which mark
an old baron’s residence. Lord Monboddo received us at his gate
most courteously, pointed to the Douglas arms upon his house,
and told us that his great-grandmother was of that family.”

The old arms are still above the door, with the inscription:

“R. I.
E. D.
1635.”

“R. I.” was Robert Irvine, a colonel in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, and possibly the superior officer of Major Dugald Dalgetty. “E. D.” was Elizabeth Douglas. Their daughter married one of the Burnetts, of Crathes Castle. There is nothing wretched, wild, or naked about Monboddo in the present day. As I saw it, no thought of a “blasted heath,” and of Macbeth’s witches could by any freak of the imagination have entered the mind. The land all round has been brought into cultivation, and there is no moor within five miles. The road along which I drove was bordered by a row of beech trees, which might have been planted by Lord Monboddo or his father. The ancient part of the house, which remains much as Boswell saw it, though large additions have been made, so far from striking one as poor and wretched, has a picturesque, old-fashioned look of decent comfort. Close to it stand a holly and a yew, which have seen the lapse of more centuries than one. The lawns are wide and soft, and very pleasant. Hard by a brook prattles along, almost hidden by rhododendrons and firs. The distant view of the Grampians; the pure, bracing air, whether the wind blows it from the sea on the east or from the mountains on the west; the lawns, the trees, the old house, picturesque in itself, and interesting in its associations, render Monboddo a most pleasant abode. In the time of the old judge it was no doubt bare enough. Where there are now lawns and flower-beds there most likely corn and turnips grew, for he was almost as fond of farming as he was of the ancients. When he received our travellers, “he was dressed,” says Boswell, “in a rustic suit, and wore a little round hat. He told us we now saw him as _Farmer Burnett_, and we should have his family dinner—a farmer’s dinner. He produced a very long stalk of corn as a specimen of his crop, and said, ‘You see here the _lætas segetes_.’” An instance of his “agricultural enthusiasm” used to be recounted by Sir Walter Scott: “Returning home one night after an absence (I think) on circuit, he went out with a candle to look at a field of turnips, then a novelty in Scotland.”[507] He had a glimpse, it should seem, of some of the wonders which chemistry was soon to work in agriculture, for being one day at Court, he told George III. that the time would come when a man would be able to carry in his waistcoat pocket manure enough for an acre of land.[508]

The “farmer’s dinner” was good enough to satisfy Dr. Johnson, for he made a very hearty meal. Yet with all the pride of a man who has a vigorous appetite, he said, “I have done greater feats with my knife than this.” The low, square, panelled room in which they dined is much as they saw it, with its three windows with deep recesses looking on to the lawns and trees. It is a solid, comfortable apartment, which might have recalled to Johnson’s memory an Oxford Common-Room, and which harmonized well with the solid talk he had with his host. In it there is a curious clock, so old that it might have told the hours to Colonel Irvine and his wife Elizabeth Douglas, and have attracted Johnson’s notice by its antiquity.

ABERDEEN (AUGUST 21-24).

Late in the afternoon our travellers drove on to Aberdeen. “We had tedious driving,” writes Boswell, “and were somewhat drowsy.” Though they “travelled with the gentle pace of a Scotch driver,” nevertheless Johnson, much as he delighted in the rapid motion of the English post-chaise, bore this journey of five-and-twenty miles with greater philosophy than his friend. “We did not,” he writes, “affect the impatience we did not feel, but were satisfied with the company of each other—as well riding in the chaise as sitting at an inn.” It was not far short of midnight when they arrived at Aberdeen. [Sidenote: THE NEW INN AT ABERDEEN.] The “New Inn” at which they stopped was full, they were told. “This was comfortless.” Fortunately Boswell’s father, when on circuit, always put up there for the five nights during which he was required by law to stay in each assize town.[509] The son was recognized by his likeness to the father, and a room was soon provided. “Mr. Boswell’s name,” writes Johnson, “overpowered all objection, and we found a very good house, and civil treatment.” A few weeks later the old judge went this same circuit. “Two men being indicted before him at Aberdeen on September 30 for petty thefts, petitioned, and were banished to the plantations for life, their service adjudged for seven years to the transporter.”[510] What these poor wretches had “petitioned” was that they might be transported instead of being hanged. The “transporter,” who bore the cost of shipping them to America, was rewarded for his outlay by having the use of them as slaves for seven years. At the end of that time they would have their freedom; but if they returned to Scotland, and were seized, in all likelihood they would have been sent to the gallows under their old sentence. It is not at all improbable that these two thieves were in the town prison at the very time of our travellers’ visit. If so, they were separated from them merely by a wall or two; for the “New Inn” formed part of the same block of buildings as the common prison. In the central tower the ordinary prisoners were confined, two rooms in the western end being reserved for burgesses, “or any of the better rank who were committed for debt.”[511] The judge in all the festivities of his circuit dinner was often close to some poor wretch whom that same day he had sentenced to the gallows, and who was awaiting his dreadful end in the gloom and misery of his dismal cell.

[Sidenote: ABERDEEN TOWN HOUSE.]

On the other side of the tower, but in the same block, was the Town House, or Town Hall as we should call it in England. When I was in Aberdeen, a man of whom I asked the way to the Town Hall, replied that he did not know where it was; but when I corrected myself, and asked for the Town House, he at once showed it me. [Sidenote: THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY.] Here it was that the freedom of the city was conferred on Johnson.

“At one o’clock (writes Boswell) we waited on the magistrates
in the town-hall, as they had invited us in order to present
Dr. Johnson with the freedom of the town, which Provost Jopp
did with a very good grace. Dr. Johnson was much pleased with
this mark of attention, and received it very politely. There
was a pretty numerous company assembled. It was striking
to hear all of them drinking, ‘Dr. Johnson! Dr. Johnson!’
in the town-hall of Aberdeen, and then to see him with his
burgess-ticket, or diploma, in his hat, which he wore as he
walked along the street, according to the usual custom.”

The hall in which the ceremony was performed was a room “46 feet long, 29 broad, and 18 high, with five large windows in front, with many elegant sconces double-branched set round it, and three diamond-cut crystal lustres hanging from the roof.”[512] It has been swept away with the New Inn and the prison, and replaced by the stately pile which rises on the old site. The Scotch towns last century seem to have been somewhat lavish in the honours which they conferred. Pennant was made a freeman of at least three or four places. Monck Berkeley, the St. Andrew’s student, had the freedom of Aberdeen and some other towns presented to him, though he was scarcely nineteen when he left Scotland. Like the dutiful young gentleman that he was, “he constantly presented the diplomas to his mother requesting her to take great care of them.”[513] George Colman the younger, who, at the age of eighteen was sent to King’s College, says in his _Random Records_:[514] “I had scarcely been a week in Old Aberdeen, when the Lord Provost of the New Town invited me to drink wine with him one evening in the Town Hall; there I found a numerous company assembled. The object of this meeting was soon declared to me by the Lord Provost, who drank my health, and presented me with the freedom of the city.” Two of his English fellow-students, of a little older standing, had received the same honour. A suspicion rises in the mind that it was sometimes not so much a desire to confer honour as to drink wine at the public expense which stirred up these town-councillors. Nevertheless, the testimony of an English gentleman, who a few years earlier had been made a citizen of Glasgow, goes far towards freeing them from so injurious a supposition. “The magistrates,” he wrote, “are all men of so reasonable a size, and so clear of all marks of gluttony and drunkenness, that I could hardly believe them to be a mayor and aldermen.”[515] With the distinction itself, on whatever account it was given, Johnson was greatly pleased. “I was presented,” he wrote, “with the freedom of the city, not in a gold box, but in good Latin. Let me pay Scotland one just praise; there was no officer gaping for a fee; this could have been said of no city on the English side of the Tweed.” In his own University of Oxford the fee for the honorary degree of D.C.L. used to be ten guineas. Cox, the Esquire Bedel, records in his _Recollections of Oxford_, how glum Canning looked when he was called on to pay it.[516] Wesley, who in the April of the previous year had been made a freeman of Perth, praised the Latinity in which the honour was conferred on him. “I doubt,” he wrote, “whether any diploma from the City of London be more pompous or expressed in better Latin.”[517]

The burgess-ticket or parchment on which the freedom was inscribed, after being read aloud in the hall, was made into a roll, and, with the appending seal, was tied on to the new citizen’s hat with red riband. “I wore,” wrote Johnson, “my patent of freedom _pro more_ in my hat from the new town to the old, about a mile.” In his narrative he states that it is worn for the whole day. In a town of 16,000 inhabitants—for Aberdeen had no more at that time[518]—it might be supposed that the face of the youngest freeman would thus become known to most of his brother-burgesses. But the population at the present day is seven or eight times as large, and the old custom has died out, perhaps because its use was lost. On those rare occasions when the honour is conferred the diploma is still tied to the hat. The new citizen covers himself for a moment, and then bares his head while he returns thanks. He might, I was told, perhaps wear his ticket for a short distance to his hotel or a club, but certainly not farther. The entry of Johnson’s freedom in its good Latin still remains in the City Register. I read it with much interest.

[Sidenote: THE CHAPEL AT ABERDEEN.]

Our travellers, as they passed a Sunday in Aberdeen, went to the English chapel. The word _chapel_, as my friend Dr. Murray has clearly pointed out in his learned Dictionary, which in England was generally used of the places of worship of the Nonconformists, and in Ireland of those of the Roman Catholics, in Scotland was properly and universally applied to the English churches. It is the term used both by Boswell and Johnson. Mrs. Carlyle in one of her early letters describes a certain Haddington Episcopalian as “a man without an arm, who sits in the chapel.”[519] “We found,” says Boswell, “a respectable congregation and an admirable organ.” By _respectable_ he meant what would a little later have been described as _genteel_. “The congregation,” wrote Johnson, “was numerous and splendid.” The volunteer who accompanied the Duke of Cumberland’s army in 1747 described the chapel as the finest he had seen in Scotland. “The handsomest young ladies,” he adds, “are generally attendants of those meeting-houses (as they call them here), and are generally esteemed as Jacobites by the staunch Whigs.”[520] Wesley, who had attended the service here a year earlier than Johnson, “could not but admire the exemplary decency of the congregation. This was the more remarkable,” he adds, “because so miserable a reader I never heard before. Listening with all attention I understood but one single word, _Balak_, in the First Lesson, and one more, _begat_, was all I could possibly distinguish in the Second.”[521] The Aberdeen chapel was no doubt one of those licensed ones “served by clergymen of English or Irish ordination,” where alone in Scotland the form of worship of the Church of England could be legally practised. [Sidenote: THE NONJURING CLERGY] At St. Andrews Boswell recorded that he had seen “in one of its streets a remarkable proof of liberal toleration; a nonjuring clergyman strutting about in his canonicals, with a jolly countenance, and a round belly, like a well-fed monk.” By an Act of Parliament passed in 1747, a heavy and cruel blow had been struck at the Scotch nonjurors as a punishment for the support which many of them had given to the young Pretender. Under severe penalties all clergymen were forbidden to officiate who had received their ordination from a nonjuring bishop, even though they took the oaths. They had now to undergo some of the suffering which in their day of triumph they had inflicted on the Covenanters. They in their turn sought the shelter of woods and moors. We read of one of them at Muthill, in Perthshire, “baptising a child under the cover of the trees in one of Lord Rollo’s parks to prevent being discovered.”[522] Two years later one Mr. John Skinner had been sent to Aberdeen jail for six months for officiating contrary to law. He survived this persecution fifty-five years, and so was contemporary with persons still living.[523] By another act all episcopal clergymen were required, whenever they celebrated worship before five people, to pray for the King and the members of the Royal Family by name, under the penalty of six months’ imprisonment for the first offence, and of banishment to America for life for the second. Many under this act were thrown into jail, and so late as 1755 one unhappy man was banished for life.[524] Others complied with the law at the expense of their lungs. An English lady who visited Scotland about the year 1778, says: “I have heard a reverend old divine say that he has read the English liturgy so repeatedly over to only four that frequently by evening he has scarce been able to speak to be heard.”[525] The persecutions had come to an end by the time of Johnson’s visit. The nonjuring ministers were, he says, “by tacit connivance quietly permitted in separate congregations.” On the death of the young Pretender on January 31st, 1788, the nonjuring bishops met at Aberdeen and directed that, beginning with Sunday, May 25th, King George should be prayed for by name. His Majesty was graciously pleased to notify his approbation.[526] Even a tutor or “pedagogue” in a gentleman’s family was required to take the oaths. This difficulty, however, was easily surmounted. They could be engaged “under the name of factor, or clerk, or comrade,” as the Bishop of Moray pointed out in a letter written in 1754.[527]

[Sidenote: THE UNIVERSITIES OF ABERDEEN.]

In Aberdeen there were two Colleges, or rather two Universities, for each had professors of the same parts of learning and each conferred degrees. In 1860 they were incorporated into one body. [Sidenote: KING’S COLLEGE.] In old Aberdeen stood King’s College. The Chapel and its “Crowned Tower,” founded by James IV. who fell at Flodden, has survived time and restorers. They are much as Johnson saw them. Of their architectural beauty and of the ancient richly carved oak screen he makes no mention: “He had not come to Scotland,” he said, “to see fine places, of which there were enough in England; but wild objects—peculiar manners; in short, things which he had not seen before.” The discipline of the Universities and the method and cost of instruction he examined with attention. In Scotch universities the students generally lived—as they live at present—in lodgings in the town, scarcely under even the pretence of control except in the hours in which they attended lectures. But in King’s College a few years earlier the English system had been introduced. Dr. Thomas Reid, the famous Professor of Moral Philosophy, in a letter written in 1755 gives an interesting account of the change which had been made:

“The students have lately been compelled to live within the
college. We need but look out at our windows to see when they
rise and when they go to bed. They are seen nine or ten times
throughout the day statedly by one or other of the masters—at
public prayers, school hours, meals, and in their rooms,
besides occasional visits which we can make with little
trouble to ourselves. They are shut up within walls at nine
at night. This discipline hath indeed taken some pains and
resolution, as well as some expense to establish it. The board
at the first table is 50 merks[528] per quarter; at the second,
40 shillings. The rent of a room is from seven to twenty
shillings in the session. There is no furniture in their rooms
but bedstead, tables, chimney grate and fender—the rest they
must buy or hire. They provide fire, and candle, and washing to
themselves. The other dues are two guineas to the Master; to
the Professors of Greek and Humanity [Latin] for their public
teaching, five shillings each. All other perquisites not named,
from twelve shillings to seventeen and sixpence.”[529]

[Sidenote: ENGLISH STUDENTS.]

Whether this reformed system lasted in its full extent to the time of Johnson’s visit, I do not know; some part of it at all events remained. “In the King’s College,” he says, “there is kept a public table, but the scholars of the Marischal College are boarded in the town.” In Aberdeen, as well as in the other Scotch Universities, students from England were commonly found. Johnson was surprised at finding in King’s College a great-grandson of Waller the poet. But in the state of degradation into which the English Universities were sunk, what was more natural than that young Englishmen should be sent to places where the Professors still remembered that they had a duty to perform as well as a salary to receive? I have seen in the Royal Society of Edinburgh a manuscript letter written by Dr. Blair from that town to David Hume in 1765, in which he says:—“Our education here is at present in high reputation. The Englishes are crowding down upon us every season, and I wish may not come to hurt us at last.” Excellent though the Aberdeen Professors were as teachers, yet before the great Englishman they seemed afraid to speak. Johnson, writing to Mrs. Thrale, said:—“Boswell was very angry that they would not talk.”

[Sidenote: REYNOLDS’S PORTRAIT OF BEATTIE.]

In Marischal College scarcely a fragment remains of the old building which our travellers saw, except the stone with the curious inscription:—“Thay haif said; quhat say thay; lat thame say.” In the spacious modern library is shown, however, a famous picture which Reynolds was at that time painting. On that very morning when Robertson was showing Johnson Holyrood Palace, Reynolds began the allegorical picture in which he represented Truth and the amiable and harmonious Beattie triumphing together over scepticism and infidelity.[530] It was commonly said that in the group of discomfited figures could be recognized the portraits of Voltaire and Hume. Goldsmith, if we may trust Northcote, reproached Reynolds “for wishing to degrade so high a genius as Voltaire before so mean a writer as Dr. Beattie.”[531] If Voltaire’s face is to be found in the picture, the likeness is so remote that even he, sensitive though he was, could scarcely have take offence, while of Hume not even the caricature can be discovered. Feeble though the allegory is, the portrait of Beattie is a very fine piece of workmanship. In Marischal College, by the generosity of his grand-nieces it has found its fitting resting-place, for here for many years he was Professor of Moral Philosophy. Here a few years earlier he had been visited by Gray, who, to quote Johnson’s words, “found him a poet, a philosopher, and a good man.”[532]

SLAINS CASTLE AND THE BULLERS OF BUCHAN. (AUGUST 24-25).