Chapter VII: Introduction (6)

At Aberdeen Johnson had found awaiting him a letter from London which must have been six days on the road.[533] He did not receive another till he arrived at Glasgow, nearly ten weeks later. He was now going “to the world’s end _extra anni solisque vias_, where the post would be a long time in reaching him,” to apply to the Hebrides the words which four years later he used of Brighton.[534] It was only seven and twenty years before he drove out from Aberdeen that the Duke of Cumberland with six battalions of foot and Lord Mark Kerr’s dragoons had marched forth along the same road to seek the rebels. With a gentle breeze and a fair wind his transports at the same time moved along shore.[535] Though no military state waited upon our travellers yet their fame went before them. At Ellon, where they breakfasted, the landlady asked Boswell: “Is not this the great Doctor that is going about through the country? There’s something great in his appearance.” “They say,” said the landlord, “that he is the greatest man in England, except Lord Mansfield.” [Sidenote: THE ROAD TO SLAINS CASTLE.] They turned here out of their course to visit Slains Castle, the seat of the Earl of Errol. The country over which they drove this day was more desolate than any through which they had as yet passed. In one place, writes Johnson, “the sand of the shore had been raised by a tempest, and carried to such a distance that an estate was overwhelmed and lost.” Sir Walter Scott, who in the summer of 1814, sailed along the shore in a Lighthouse Yacht, says that northwards of Aberdeen “the coast changes from a bold and rocky to a low and sandy character. Along the Bay of Belhelvie a whole parish was swallowed up by the shifting sands, and is still a desolate waste. It belonged to the Earls of Errol, and was rented at £500 a year at the time. When these sands are past the land is all arable. Not a tree to be seen; nor a grazing cow, or sheep, or even a labour-horse at grass, though this be Sunday.”[536] The Earl who welcomed Johnson to Slains Castle had done what he could to overcome nature. “He had cultivated his fields so as to bear rich crops of every kind, and he had made an excellent kitchen-garden with a hot-house.” His successors have diligently followed in his steps, and taking advantage of a hollow in the ground have even raised an avenue of trees. They can only grow to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, for when the shoots rise high enough to catch the blasts from the North Sea they are cut down the following winter. [Sidenote: SLAINS CASTLE.] The situation of the Castle struck Johnson as the noblest he had ever seen.

“From the windows (he said) the eye wanders over the sea
that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat
with violence, must enjoy all the terrific grandeur of the
tempestuous ocean. I would not for my amusement wish for a
storm; but as storms, whether wished or not, will sometimes
happen, I may say, without violation of humanity, that I should
willingly look out upon them from Slains Castle.”

Boswell was also impressed with the position of this old house, set on the very verge of life. “The King of Denmark,” he says, “is Lord Errol’s nearest neighbour on the north-east.” The Castle was built on the edge of the granite cliffs, in one spot not leaving even a foothold for the daring climber. A foolhardy fellow who had tried to get round lost his life in the attempt. I was greatly disappointed at finding that “the excellent old house” which Boswell describes, with its outside galleries on the first and second story, no longer remains. I had looked forward to standing in the very bow-window of the drawing-room fronting the sea where Johnson repeated Horace’s Ode, _Jam satis terris_. In the new building, however, the bow-window has not been forgotten,—and there I looked out on the wild scene which met his view. I saw “the cut in the rock made by the influx of the sea,” into which the rash climber had fallen as he tried to go round the Castle. Below me there were short slopes of grass ending in a precipice. So near was the edge that a child could have tossed a ball over it from the window. Red granite rocks in sharp and precipitous headlands ran out into the sea. A fishing-boat with brown sails was passing close by, while in the distance in a long line lay a fleet of herring-smacks. The sea-birds were hovering about and perching on the rocks, mingling their melancholy cries with the dashing of the waves. The dark waters were surging through the narrow chasms formed by rocky islets and the steep sides of the cliffs. For the storm-tost sailor it is a dreadful coast. [Sidenote: A SHIPWRECK OFF SLAINS CASTLE.] On a wild night in winter not many years ago one of the maids, as she was letting down the blinds in the drawing-room, heard confused sounds which came, she thought, from the servants’ hall beneath. The butler in another part of the house had caught them too. Yet when they reproached their fellow-servants with their noisiness they were told that it was not from them that the sounds had come. They thought no more about it that night, but next morning when the day broke the masts were seen of a ship-wrecked vessel on the rocks below the Castle. The waves were breaking over it, and not a soul was left alive. Then they understood that it was the despairing cries of the unhappy sailors which had in vain reached their ears. The story, that was told me as I stood looking out on the sea, gave an air of sadness to a room which had already raised sad thoughts in my mind. [Sidenote: THE EARL OF KILMARNOCK.] For on the wall was hanging the portrait of an innocent and pretty boy who, before so many years were to pass over him, on the scaffold on Tower Hill was to pay the penalty of rebellion with his life.

“Pitied by gentle minds Kilmarnock died.”

On the table was lying a curious but gloomy collection of the prints of his trial and execution.[537] Boswell’s rest was troubled by the thoughts of this unhappy nobleman. He had been kept awake by the blazing of his fire, the roaring of the sea, and the smell of his pillows, which were made of the feathers of some sea-fowl. “I saw in imagination,” he writes, “Lord Errol’s father, Lord Kilmarnock, who was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1746, and I was somewhat dreary.”

In the drawing-room was hanging that fine whole-length picture of Lord Errol, which led Johnson to talk of his friend, the great painter, and “to conclude his panegyric by saying, ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds, sir, is the most invulnerable man I know; the man with whom if you should quarrel, you would find the most difficulty how to abuse.’”

In the rebellion of 1745, Lord Errol, following a plan not unknown among the Scotch nobility, had served on the opposite side from his father. At Culloden he had seen him brought in prisoner. “The Earl of Kilmarnock had lost his hat, and his long hair was flying over his face. The son stepped out of the ranks, and taking off his own hat placed it over his father’s disordered and wind-beaten locks.”[538] The young man in his loyalty to George II., did not follow the example of his forefathers, for he was descended from at least three lines of rebels. “He united in his person the four earldoms of Errol, Kilmarnock, Linlithgow, and Callander.” The last two were attainted in 1715, and Kilmarnock in 1746.[539] As we gaze at the haughty-looking man whom Reynolds has so finely painted in the robes of a peer, we call to mind the coronation of George III., where he played his part as High Constable of Scotland—“the noblest figure I ever saw,” wrote Horace Walpole.[540] To Johnson he recalled Homer’s character of Sarpedon.[541] At the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, Walpole thought, as well he might, on that “most melancholy scene” which he had witnessed less than fifteen years before in that same hall, when the earl’s father, “tall and slender, his behaviour a most just mixture between dignity and submission,” had in vain pleaded for mercy.[542]

[Sidenote: THE BULLERS OF BUCHAN.]

From Slains Castle our travellers drove a short distance along the coast to the famous Bullers of Buchan—“a sight,” writes Johnson, “which no man can see with indifference, who has either sense of danger or delight in rarity.” Boswell describes the spot as:—

“A circular basin of large extent, surrounded with tremendous
rocks. On the quarter next the sea, there is a high arch in the
rock, which the force of the tempest has driven out. This place
is called _Buchan’s Buller_, or the _Buller of Buchan_, and
the country people call it the _Pot_. Mr. Boyd said it was so
called from the French _bouloir_.[543] It may be more simply
traced from _boiler_ in our own language. We walked round this
monstrous cauldron. In some places the rock is very narrow;
and on each side there is a sea deep enough for a man-of-war
to ride in; so that it is somewhat horrid to move along.
However, there is earth and grass upon the rock, and a kind of
road marked out by the print of feet; so that one makes it out
pretty safely: yet it alarmed me to see Dr. Johnson striding
irregularly along.”

As the weather was calm they took a boat and rowed through the archway into the cauldron. “It was a place,” writes Johnson, “which, though we could not think ourselves in danger, we could scarcely survey without some recoil of mind.” He thought that “it might have served as a shelter from storms to the little vessels used by the northern rovers.” Sir Walter Scott, however, was told that this was impossible, for “in a high gale the waves rush in with incredible violence. An old fisher said he had seen them flying over the natural wall of the Bullers, which cannot be less than two hundred feet high.”[544] In the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1755 (p. 200), two strange pictures are given of this curious place, which must surely have been drawn in St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, by an artist who had never seen it.

[Sidenote: DUN BUY.]

Not far off is Dun Buy,[545] a lofty island rock placed in an angle of the shore that is formed by no less lofty cliffs. The sea, with its dark waters in endless rise and fall, washes through the narrow channel, its ceaseless murmur answering to the cries of the countless water-fowl who high up on the ledges breed in safety. On one side, where there is a steep, grassy slope, Dun Buy can be scaled. I climbed up it many years ago one hot summer’s day, and thought that I had never seen so strange and wild a spot. Johnson had also visited it, but his mind was not affected as was my young imagination, for he said that “upon these rocks there was nothing that could long detain attention.”

BANFF AND ELGIN (AUGUST 25-26).

Starting from Slains Castle on the morning of August 25, Boswell and Johnson drove on to Banff, where they spent the night in an indifferent inn. In this little town a dreadful sight had been witnessed when the Duke of Cumberland’s army arrived on an early day in April, 1746. The savage way in which the narrative is written, testifies to the ferocity of many of the followers of “the butcher duke.”

“At Banff” (writes Ray) “two rebel spies were taken; the one
was knotching on a stick the number of our forces, for which he
was hanged on a tree in the town; and the other a little out of
town, and for want of a tree was hanged on what they call the
ridging-tree of a house that projected out from the end, and on
his breast was fixed in writing, _A Rebel Spy_, which, with
the addition of _good entertainment_, might have been a very
famous sign.”[546]

From Banff our travellers drove on to Elgin, passing through Lord Findlater’s domain. It is strange that neither of them mentions the passage of the Spey, which ofttimes was a matter of great difficulty and even danger. Wesley describes it as “the most rapid river, next the Rhine, he had ever seen.”[547] It was no doubt very low, owing to “that long continuance of dry weather which,” as Johnson complained a few days later, “divested the Fall of Foyers of its dignity and terror.” At Elgin they dined, and dined badly. “It was,” he said, “the first time he had seen a dinner in Scotland that he could not eat.” [Sidenote: THE RED LION AT ELGIN.] He might have reasonably expected something better, for in the account of Scotch inns given in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1771 (p. 544), the Red Lion at Elgin, kept by Leslie, is described as good. It is added that “he is the only landlord in Scotland who wears ruffles.” As this was the inn in which the civic feasts were always held, the honour not only of the landlord, but also of the town was wounded by the publication of Johnson’s narrative. I am glad to be able to inform the world that a satisfactory explanation has been given, and that Elgin and the Red Lion were not guilty of the inhospitality with which they have so long been reproached, and so unjustly. It seems that for some years before Johnson’s visit a commercial traveller, Thomas Paufer by name, used in his rounds to come to this inn.

“He cared little about eating, but liked the more exhilarating
system of drinking. His means were limited, and he was in the
habit of ordering only a very slender dinner, that he might
spend the more in the pleasures of the bottle. This traveller
bore a very striking resemblance to Dr. Johnson. When the
doctor arrived at the inn, the waiter, by a hasty glance,
mistook him for Paufer, and such a dinner was prepared as
Paufer was wont to receive. The doctor suffered by the mistake,
for he did not ask for that which was to follow. Thus the good
name of Elgin suffered, through the mistaking of the person
of the ponderous lexicographer. This fact is well known, and
is authenticated by some of the oldest and most respectable
citizens of the town.”[548]

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

[Sidenote: AN ELGIN FUNERAL BILL.]

Mr. Paufer’s means must have been indeed limited, for unless prices had greatly risen in the previous thirty years, a good dinner and wine could have been provided at a most moderate charge, to judge by the following entries in an Elgin “funeral bill,” dated Sept 26, 1742:—

“One dozen strong old claret (bottles being returned) 14_s._ 0_d._
4 lb. 12 oz. of sugar 3_s._ 4_d._
five dozen eggs 5_d._
six hens 2_s._ 0_d._”[549]

One pound of sugar, it will be noticed, cost as much as two hens, and a little more than eight dozen eggs. With sugar at such a price it must have given a shock to a careful Scotch housewife to see well-sweetened lemonade flung out of the window merely because a waiter had used his dirty fingers to drop in the lumps.

To Johnson Elgin seemed “a place of little trade and thinly inhabited.” Yet Defoe, writing only fifty years earlier, had said: “As the country is rich and pleasant, so here are a great many rich inhabitants, and in the town of Elgin in particular, for the gentlemen, as if this was the Edinburgh or the Court for this part of the island, leave their Highland habitations in the winter, and come and live here for the diversion of the place and plenty of provisions.”[550]

[Sidenote: THE PIAZZAS IN ELGIN.]

Much of its ancient prosperity has returned to it. If it cannot boast of being a court for the north, it is at all events a pleasant little market-town that shows no sign of decay. The covered ways which in many places ran on each side of the street have disappeared. “Probably,” writes Boswell, “it had piazzas all along the town, as I have seen at Bologna. I approved much of such structures in a town, on account of their conveniency in wet weather. Dr. Johnson disapproved of them, ‘because,’ said he, ‘it makes the under story of a house very dark, which greatly overbalances the conveniency, when it is considered how small a part of the year it rains; how few are usually in the street at such times; that many who are might as well be at home; and the little that people suffer, supposing them to be as much wet as they commonly are in walking a street.’” “They were a grand place for the boys to play at marbles,” said an old man to me, who well remembered the past glories of Elgin and the delights of his youth. Even at the time of our travellers’ visit, they were frequently broken by houses built in the modern fashion. In many cases they have not been destroyed, but converted into small shops. “There are,” writes a local antiquary, “some fine old piazzas in the High Street which have been whitewashed over and hidden.” He suggests that some of these might be restored to the light of day.[551] It would be a worthy deed for the citizens, even in one spot, to bring back the former appearance of their ancient town.

[Sidenote: CATHEDRALS IN RUINS.]

The noble ruins of the great cathedral Johnson examined with a most patient attention, though the rain was falling fast. “They afforded him another proof of the waste of reformation.” His indignation was excited even more than by the ruins at St. Andrew’s; for “the cathedral was not destroyed by the tumultuous violence of Knox, but suffered to dilapidate by deliberate robbery and frigid indifference.” By an order of Council the lead had been stripped off the roof and shipped to be sold in Holland. “I hope,” adds Johnson, “every reader will rejoice that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea.” On this passage Horace Walpole remarks in a letter to Lord Hailes:—“I confess I have not quite so heinous an idea of sacrilege as Dr. Johnson. Of all kinds of robbery that appears to me the lightest species which injures nobody. Dr. Johnson is so pious, that in his journey to your country he flatters himself that all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church. I doubt that uncharitable anathema is more in the spirit of the Old Testament than of the New.”[552] While Johnson censured the frigid indifference of the Scotch, he did not forget the ruin that was being slowly worked in England by the avarice and neglect of deans and canons. “Let us not,” he wrote, “make too much haste to despise our neighbours. Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation. It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence, and we are in danger of doing that deliberately which the Scots did not do but in the unsettled state of an imperfect constitution.” He had learnt, there seems good reason to believe, that the chapter of the cathedral of his own town of Lichfield intended to strip the lead off its roof and cover it instead with slate. As he had first printed his narrative he had much more closely pointed the attack. It had run as follows: “There is now, as I have heard, a body of men not less decent or virtuous than the Scottish council, longing to melt the lead of an English cathedral. What they shall melt, it were just that they should swallow.” Before publication he had the leaf cancelled, from the tender recollection that the dean had done him a kindness about forty years before. “He is now very old, and I am not young. Reproach can do him no good, and in myself I know not whether it is zeal or wantonness.”[553]

As I turned away from the ruins with my thoughts full of the past—of the ancient glory of the cathedral, of the strange sights which had been seen from its tower when the Young Pretender’s Highlanders hurried by, closely followed by the English army, of old Johnson wandering about in the heavy rain—I was suddenly reminded of the vastness of “the abysm of time” by which they are separated from us, by reading in an advertisement placarded on the walls, that for £3 16_s._ 5_d._ could be had a ticket from Elgin to Paris and back.

NAIRN AND CAWDOR (AUGUST 27-28).

[Sidenote: THE ROYAL BURGH OF NAIRN.]

Leaving Elgin that same afternoon, our travellers drove on to Fores, where they passed the night. Next morning, continuing their journey early, they breakfasted at Nairn. “Though a county town and a royal burgh, it is,” writes Boswell, “a miserable place.” Johnson also describes it as being “in a state of miserable decay.” Nevertheless, “the chief annual magistrate,” he says, “is styled Lord Provost.” If it sank as a royal burgh, it has raised its head again as a popular bathing-place. In this respect it has not its rival, I was told, in the north of Scotland. Here Johnson “fixed the verge of the Highlands; for here he first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse language.”[554] Over the room in the inn where he and Boswell sat “a girl was spinning wool with a great wheel, and singing an Erse song.” It was thirty years later that Wordsworth in like manner heard “The Solitary Reaper”:

“Yon solitary Highland lass
Reaping and singing by herself.”

Even so far back as the reign of James VI. both languages were spoken in Nairn. “It was one of that king’s witticisms to boast that in Scotland he had a town ‘sae lang that the folk at the tae end couldna understand the tongue spoken at the tother.’”[555] Gaelic is no longer heard in its streets. The verge of the Higher lands must now be fixed farther to the west. Nine years before Johnson’s visit the little town had been stirred up by Wesley. On Monday, June 11, 1764, he recorded in his journal: “While we were dining at Nairn, the innkeeper said, ‘Sir, the gentlemen of the town have read the little book you gave me on Saturday, and would be glad if you would please give them a sermon.’ Upon my consenting, the bell was immediately rung, and the congregation was quickly in the kirk.”[556]

[Sidenote: CAWDOR MANSE.]

From Nairn our travellers turned a few miles out of their course to visit the Rev. Kenneth Macaulay in his manse at Cawdor. To Johnson he was known by his _History of St. Kilda_—“a very pretty piece of topography” as he called it to the author, “who did not seem much to mind the compliment.” To us he is interesting as the great-uncle of Lord Macaulay. “From his conversation,” says Boswell, “Dr. Johnson was convinced that he had not written the book which goes under his name. ‘There is a combination in it’ (he said) ‘of which Macaulay is not capable.’” “To those who happen to have read the work,” writes Sir George Trevelyan, “Johnson’s decision will give a very poor notion of my ancestor’s abilities.”[557] Let him take comfort. The present minister of Cawdor, to whose civility I am indebted, told me that in the Kirk Session Records is a minute by Macaulay “most beautifully expressed.” I had hoped to sit in the very parlour where Johnson had reproached him with being “a bigot to laxness,” and where he had given his little son a Sallust, promising at the same time to get him a servitorship at Oxford when he was ready for the University. But hopes that are based on the permanence of buildings are often disappointed. Of the old manse nothing remains. The minister, who rejoiced in having a more comfortable home than his predecessors, refused to share in my sentimental regrets. The situation seemed a pleasant one, as I saw it on a fine evening in July, with the sun setting behind the hills on the other side of the Moray Firth. The haymakers were busy at their work close to the house, in a field which is bounded on one side by a deep hollow, with a little brook flowing at the bottom, and in front by a row of old ash trees.

[Sidenote: TALK IN CAWDOR MANSE.]

In the company of Macaulay Boswell “had dreaded that a whole evening would be heavy. However,” he adds, “Mr. Grant, an intelligent and well-bred minister in the neighbourhood, was there, and assisted us by his conversation.” His grandson is Colonel Grant, who shares with Captain Speke the glory of having discovered the sources of the Nile. It was indeed an unusual gathering that August evening in the parlour of the quiet manse—Johnson, the first of talkers, Boswell, the first of biographers, the great-uncle of our famous historian, and the grandfather of our famous discoverer. My hopes rose high when I was told that a diary which Mr. Grant kept was still in existence. Of this evening’s talk some record surely would have been made. With sorrow I learnt from his grandson that “accounts of expenses, sermons preached, peat-cutting, stipends, washing _twice a year_, births, &c., are the principal things which are mentioned.” This washing twice a year must not be taken as a proof that this divine “had no passion for clean linen.” A Scotch friend of mine remembers a man who owned three farms in the neighbourhood of Campbeltown. In his house they only washed twice a year, though both he and his three sons who lived with him changed their shirts every second day. A time was chosen when there was a slackness in the ordinary work, and then the female servants were gathered from the three farms for a week’s hard washing. This same custom exists, I believe, to the present day in Norway. [Sidenote: CAWDOR CHURCH.] In the churchyard I found Mr. Grant’s tombstone. He lived till 1828—fifty-five years after he had met Johnson. He used to tell a story about the doctor which happily has been preserved. He had supped with him, as we learn from Boswell, at the inn at Inverness. Johnson, who was in high spirits, gave an account of the kangaroo, which had lately been discovered in New South Wales, “and volunteered an imitation of the animal. The company stared; Mr. Grant said nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man like Dr. Johnson standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.”[558]

[Sidenote: PENANCE-RING, CAWDOR CHURCH.]

Near Mr. Grant lies his friend and predecessor Kenneth Macaulay, with an inscription which tells that he was “notus in fratres animi paterni.” This _animus paternus_ descended in full measure to Lord Macaulay. On the porch of the church is still fastened by an iron chain the old penance-ring which Pennant saw one hundred and twenty years ago. “Observed,” he writes, “on a pillar of the door of Calder church a _joug_, _i.e._, an iron yoke or ring, fastened to a chain; which was in former times put round the necks of delinquents against the rules of the Church, who were left there exposed to shame during the time of divine service, and was also used as a punishment for defamation, small thefts, &c., but these penalties are now happily abolished.”[559] From such penance as this there was perhaps an escape for those who were well-to-do. From _Hudibras_ we learn that the Presbyterian saints could “sentence to stools or poundage of repentance,” which passage is explained by the commentator as “doing penance in the Scotch way, upon the stool of repentance, or commuting the penance for a sum of money.”[560]

[Sidenote: CAWDOR CASTLE.]

“By the direction of Mr. Macaulay,” writes Johnson, “we visited Cawdor Castle, from which Macbeth drew his second title.” That they should have needed a direction to visit so beautiful a spot seems strange, for they must have passed close by it on their way to the manse. As I first caught sight of it by the light of a summer evening, I thought that I had rarely seen a fairer spot. This castle hath indeed a pleasant seat, I said. All the barrenness of the eastern coast I had left behind me, and had found in its stead a luxuriance of growth that would have graced the oldest mansion in England. Everything seemed beautiful, and everything harmonious—the ancient castle, with its high-pitched roof and its lofty tower; the swift-flowing river, with its bridge of a single arch; the curve in the road where it crosses it; the avenue of lofty trees, the lawns enclosed by limes, the shrubberies, and the range of mountains in the distance still showing the light of the sun which had set for us. The water murmured pleasantly, and a gentle breeze rustled the leaves. I found a little inn close by the park gate, where homely fare and decent lodging are provided. A man of a quiet meditative mind might pass a few days there pleasantly enough if he sought shelter in the woods on the afternoons when the castle is thrown open to visitors. Next morning I watched the school-children, bare-footed, but clean and tidy, carrying on their arms their slates covered with sums in neat figures, trooping merrily by, and winding over the bridge on their way to school. By the kindness of the Earl of Cawdor I was allowed to go over the castle from turret almost to foundation-stone at a time when it was not generally open.

“The old tower,” says Boswell, “must be of great antiquity.
There is a draw-bridge—what has been a moat—and an ancient
court. There is a hawthorn-tree, which rises like a wooden
pillar through the rooms of the castle; for, by a strange
conceit, the walls have been built round it. The thickness of
the walls, the small slanting windows, and a great iron door
at the entrance on the second story as you ascend the stairs,
all indicate the rude times in which this castle was erected.
There were here some large venerable trees.”

It is surprising that he should have thought that there could ever have been a moat on a rock high above the river. Johnson nevertheless also mentions it. What they mistook for a moat is the excavation made in quarrying the stone for the castle. In clearing it out some while ago, the workmen came to a place where the masons had left some stones half dressed. Mr. Irving, who visited Cawdor, has had the fine entrance copied, I am told, in his scenery for Macbeth, adding, however, a portcullis, of which no traces remain. I was shown in a kind of vault the trunk of the old hawthorn which Boswell mentions. There is a tradition that “a wise man counselled a certain thane to load an ass with a chest full of gold, and to build his castle with the money at the third hawthorn-tree at which the animal should stop.” The ass stopped where Cawdor Castle is built, and the tree was enclosed. The thane’s only child, a little girl, was carried off by Campbell of Inverliver, on Loch Awe. In his flight he was overtaken by the Cawdors. Being hard pressed, “he cried out in Gaelic, ‘It is a far cry to Loch Awe, and a distant help to the Campbells,’ a saying which became proverbial in the north to express imminent danger and distant relief.”[561] He won the day, however, and the child when she grew up married a son of the Earl of Argyle. From them is descended that “prosperous gentleman,” the present Thane or Earl of Cawdor.

I passed through the great iron door which Boswell mentions, and other strong doors too, and climbed up the staircase which is built in the thickness of the wall. I was shown the place in the roof where Lord Lovat, when fleeing from justice early in his bad career, had lain in hiding for some weeks. I saw, moreover, more than one chamber hung with old tapestry. In one of them stands the state bed of Sir Hugh Campbell, who in 1672 married Lady Henrietta Stewart. Their initials, with the date, are carved on the outside wall of the court. At one end of the hall runs a gallery which bears the name of the Fiddler’s Walk. There the musicians used to play, keeping time with their steps to their tune.

INVERNESS (AUGUST 28-30).

From Cawdor Johnson and Boswell drove to Fort George, “the most regular fortification in the island,” according to Johnson; “where,” he continues, “they were entertained by Sir Eyre Coote, the Governor, with such elegance of conversation, as left us no attention to the delicacies of his table.” Wolfe, who saw it in 1751, when it was partly made, writes: “I believe there is still work for six or seven years to do. When it is finished one may venture to say (without saying much) that it will be the most considerable fortress, and the best situated in Great Britain.”[562] In the evening our travellers continued their journey to Inverness—a distance of twelve miles. [Sidenote: CULLODEN.] The reviewer of Johnson’s narrative in the _Scots Magazine_ expresses his wonder that as “he must have passed near the Field of Culloden he studiously avoided to mention that battle.”[563] Boswell is equally reticent. The explanation is perhaps merely due to the dusk of evening, in which they passed by the spot. It is not unlikely, on the other hand, that the silence was intentional. Johnson shows a curious reticence in a passage in which he refers to the Rebellion of 1745. In his description of Rasay he writes: “Not many years ago the late laird led out one hundred men upon a military expedition.” [Sidenote: THE BUTCHER DUKE.] Had he visited Culloden or described the campaign, his indignation must have flamed forth at the cruelties of the butcher duke. Boswell, Lowlander though he was, said “that they would never be forgotten.” With Smollett, in his _Tears of Scotland_, they might well have exclaimed:—

“Yet when the rage of battle ceased,
The victor’s soul was not appeased:
The naked and forlorn must feel
Devouring flames and murd’ring steel.”

Johnson does indeed speak of “the heavy hand of a vindictive conqueror.”[564] It was about this time, or only a little later, that Scott was learning “to detest the name of Cumberland with more than infant hatred.”[565] That an Englishman could travel in safety, unarmed and unguarded, through a country which only seven and twenty years before had been so mercilessly treated seems not a little surprising. For the next day or two he was to follow a course where fire and sword had swept along. Wolfe, whose “great name,” we boast, was “compatriot with our own,” who had so little of the savage spirit of war that he would rather have written Gray’s _Elegy_ than take Quebec, even he exulted that “as few prisoners were taken of the Highlanders as possible. We had an opportunity of avenging ourselves. The rebels left near 1,500 dead.” Yet he did not think that enough had been done. The carnage-pile was not lofty enough. Surveying the battle-field five years later, he writes in a letter to his father, a general in the army, “I find room for a military criticism. You would not have left those ruffians the only possible means of conquest, nor suffered multitudes to go off unhurt with the power to destroy.”[566] Ruffians indeed they had shown themselves in their raid into England, but enough surely had been done in the way of slaughter to satisfy the most exacting military critic. How merciless our soldiers had been is proved by the letters that were written from the camp. A despatch sent off from Inverness on April 25, nine days after the battle, says that “the misery and distress of the fugitive rebels was inexpressible, hundreds being found dead of their wounds and through hunger at the distance of twelve, fourteen, and even twenty miles from the field.”[567] On June 5 an officer wrote from Fort Augustus: “His Royal Highness has carried fire and sword through their country, and driven off their cattle, which we bring to our camp in great quantities, sometimes 2,000 in a drove. The people are deservedly in a most deplorable way, and must perish either by sword or famine, a just reward for traitors.”[568]

[Sidenote: THE HIGHLANDS LAID WASTE.]

On July 26 another officer wrote from the same fort to a friend at Newcastle: “We hang or shoot everyone that is known to conceal the Pretender, burn their houses and take their cattle, of which we have got some 8,000 head within these few days past, so that if some of your Northumberland graziers were here they might make their fortunes.”[569] The author of a _Plain Narrative of the Rebellion_, tells with exultation how “they marched to Loch Yell, the stately seat of old Esquire Cameron,” the Lochiel of Campbell’s spirited lines. “His fine chairs, tables, and all his cabinet goods were set on fire and burnt with his house. His fine fruit garden, above a mile long, was pulled to pieces and laid waste. A beautiful summer-house that stood in the pleasure garden was also set on fire. From hence the party marched along the sea-coast through Moidart, burning of houses, driving away the cattle, and shooting those vagrants who were found about the mountains. For fifty miles round there was no man or beast to be seen.”[570] Andrew Henderson, in his _History of the Rebellion_, after admitting that in the rout several of the wounded were stabbed, and some who were lurking in houses were taken out and shot, urges by way of excuse that “the rebels had enraged the troops; their habit was strange, their language still stranger, and their way of fighting was shocking to the utmost degree.”[571] Besides the massacre after the battle and the executions by courts-martial, there were the hangings, drawings and quarterings, and beheadings by judge and jury. Seventy-six had been sent to the scaffold by September, 1747,[572] and above one thousand were transported.[573] Even George II. “said that he believed William had been rough with them.”[574] When it was proposed to confer on the duke the freedom of the City of London, an alderman was heard to say that it ought to be the freedom of the Butchers’ Company. So late as the summer of 1753 seven rebels were seized in a hut on the side of Loch Hourn, at no great distance from the way along which Johnson was to pass only twenty years later.[575] Nevertheless he everywhere travelled in safety. Among the chieftains, no doubt, “his tenderness for the unfortunate House of Stuart” was known, but to the common people he would only be an Englishman—a man of the race that had slaughtered their fathers and wasted their country. That both he and Boswell were not free from uneasiness they avowed when at Auchnasheal they were surrounded by the wild McCraas. In the memory of men not much past the middle age, tales of the cruel duke used to be told in the winter evenings in the glens of these Western Highlands. They have at last died away, and “infant hatred” is no longer nourished.[576]

[Sidenote: INVERNESS.]

Our travellers, whatever may have been their motive, leaving the Field of Culloden unvisited and unnoticed, arrived at Inverness, the capital of the Highlands. They put up at Mackenzie’s Inn. Of their accommodation they say nothing; but it can scarcely have been good, if we may trust an English traveller who two years earlier had found, he said, the Horns Inn, kept by Mrs. Mackenzie, dirty and ill-managed.[577] Perhaps they felt as Wolfe did when he was stationed in the town with his regiment. “It would be unmanly,” he wrote, “and very unbecoming a soldier to complain of little evils, such as bad food, bad lodging, bad fire.... With these reflections I reconcile myself to Inverness, and to other melancholy spots that we are thrown upon.” He adds that the post goes but once a week, and that as there are rapid rivers on the road that have neither bridge nor boat, it is often delayed by the floods.[578] Wesley describes Inverness as the largest town he had seen in Scotland after Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. “It stands in a pleasant and fruitful country, and has all things needful for life and godliness. The people in general speak remarkably good English, and are of a friendly, courteous behaviour.”[579] Their good English they were said to derive from the garrison which Cromwell had settled among them. It had been noticed by Defoe. “They speak,” he said, “perfect English, even much better than in the most southerly provinces of Scotland; nay, some will say that they speak it as well as at London, though I do not grant that neither.”[580] Their behaviour had greatly improved in the thirteen years which had elapsed between Wolfe’s second and Wesley’s first visit, unless the soldier had viewed them with the stern eye of the conqueror, or they had displayed the sullenness of the conquered. “A little while,” he wrote, “serves to discover the villainous nature of the inhabitants and brutality of the people in the neighbourhood.”[581] Yet the brutality was quite as much on the side of the army, for a year later, five full years after the battle, we find the people still treated with harshness and insolence. The magistrates had invited Lord Bury, the general in command, to an entertainment on the Duke of Cumberland’s birthday. “He said he did not doubt but it would be more agreeable to the duke if they postponed it to the day following, the anniversary of Culloden. They stared, said they could not promise on their own authority, but would go and consult their body. They returned, told him it was unprecedented and could not be complied with. Lord Bury replied he was sorry they had not given a negative at once, for he had mentioned it to his soldiers, who would not bear a disappointment, and was afraid it would provoke them to some outrage upon the town. This did; they celebrated Culloden.”[582]

The old town had witnessed a strange sight in the first days after the battle. The soldiers had held a fair for the sale of the plunder which they had made. “The traffic on the Rialto Bridge was nothing in comparison to the business done by our military merchants; here being great sortments of all manner of plaids, broad-swords, dirks and pistols, and plaid-waistcoats, officers’ laced waistcoats, hats, bonnets, blankets, and oatmeal bags.”[583] The severity that was so long exercised by government at length sank into neglect. Only five years before the arrival of our travellers all the prisoners, just before the opening of the Assize, made their escape from the town jail; “so the Lord Pitfour,” a writer to the Signet wrote, “will have the trouble only of fugitation and reprimanding the magistrates.”[584] How miserable the jail was is shown in a memorial from the Town Council, dated March 17, 1786, stating that “it consists only of two small cells for criminals, and one miserable room for civil debtors. Their situation is truly deplorable, as there are at present and generally about thirty persons confined in these holes, none of which is above thirteen feet square.”[585] While the poor prisoners were so cruelly treated, the lawyers had a merry time of it every time that so hospitable a judge as Boswell’s father came the circuit:—

“Lord Auchinleck made a most respectable figure at the head of
his circuit table. It was his rule to spend every shilling of
his allowance for the circuit—a thing less to be expected that
in everything else he was supposed to be abundantly economical.
He had a plentiful table. He laughed much at the rule laid down
by some of his brethren of asking gentlemen but once to dinner.
‘It is,’ said he, ‘treating them like beggars at a burial, who
get their alms in rotation.’”[586]

We are not surprised that Boswell found that “everybody at Inverness spoke of Lord Auchinleck with uncommon regard.”

The English chapel, which Johnson describes as “meanly built, but with a very decent congregation,” was pulled down many years ago. On its site, in the midst of the same old graveyard, another building has been raised in what may be perhaps called the church-warden style. Of Macbeth’s castle—“what is called the castle of Macbeth,” writes Johnson with his usual caution—nothing remains. If we may trust Boswell, “it perfectly corresponded with Shakespeare’s description.” It has been replaced by “a modern building of chaste castellated design,” to borrow the language of the guide-book. I was told, however, that our travellers had been misinformed, and that “the old original Macbeth’s castle” stood on a height a little distance from the town. This “pleasant seat” has been treated, I found, even worse than its rival; for a builder, thinking that the air “might nimbly and sweetly recommend itself” to the public as well as to a king, began the erection of a crescent. Owing to a difficulty about a right of way, the speculation hitherto has not been so successful as might have been feared.

[Sidenote: THE ENTRANCE TO THE HIGHLANDS.]

At Inverness the Lowland life came to an end. To the west of that town no road had ever been made till some years after the rising of 1715. All beyond was the work of General Wade and the other military engineers. “Here,” writes Johnson, “the appearance of life began to alter. I had seen a few women with plaids at Aberdeen, but at Inverness the Highland manners are common. There is, I think, a kirk in which only the Erse language is used.” The plaid, which was not peculiar to the Highlands, had been rapidly going out of fashion. Ramsay of Ochtertyre says that in 1747, when he first knew Edinburgh, nine-tenths of the ladies still wore them. Five years later “one could hardly see a lady in that piece of dress. In the course of seven or eight years the very servant girls were ashamed of being seen in that ugly antiquated garb.”[587] The Gaelic language does not seem to have lost much ground in Inverness, for I was told that there are five churches in which it is used every Sunday at one of the services.

INVERNESS TO ANOCH (AUGUST 30-31).

[Sidenote: WANT OF ROADS.]

At Inverness Johnson bade farewell to post-chaises, which had brought him in comfort all the way from London. “This day,” writes Boswell, “we were to begin our _equitation_, as I said; for I would needs make a word too. We might have taken a chaise to Fort Augustus, but had we not hired horses at Inverness we should not have found them afterwards. We had three horses for Dr. Johnson, myself, and Joseph, and one which carried our portmanteaus, and two Highlanders who walked along with us.” They took but little baggage, and soon found the advantage of their moderation “in climbing crags and treading bogs. How often,” continues Johnson, “a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will in the hour of darkness and fatigue be content to leave behind him everything but himself.” After leaving the Fort they were “to enter upon a country upon which perhaps no wheel had ever rolled.” In the Commercial Map of Scotland, published by J. Knox in 1784, there is not a single road marked in any one of the Hebrides. After long wanderings, and the lapse of almost seven weeks, “Johnson’s heart was cheered by the sight of a road marked with cart-wheels as on the mainland, a thing which we had not seen for a long time. It gave us a pleasure similar to that which a traveller feels when, whilst wandering on what he fears is a desert island, he perceives the print of human feet.” It was in pleasant weather that they began their ride. [Sidenote: THE SHORES OF LOCH NESS.] “The day though bright was not hot. On the left were high and steep rocks shaded with birch and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Loch Ness were beating their bank and waving their surface by a gentle agitation.” In one part of the way, adds Johnson, “we had trees on both sides for perhaps half a mile. Such a length of shade, perhaps, Scotland cannot show in any other place.” Boswell, though he thought Fleet Street more delightful than Tempe, nevertheless felt the cheering powers of this delightful day. “The scene” he found “as sequestered and agreeably wild as could be desired.” Pennant, who had been there four years earlier, describes the scenery as “most romantic and beautiful.”[588] Wesley thought the neighbourhood of Inverness one of the pleasantest countries he had ever seen.[589] In striking contrast with the enjoyment of these four travellers are the feelings of those who a few years before had seen the spot when the alarms of war were still fresh. “On each side of Loch Ness,” writes Ray, “is a ridge of most terrible barren woody mountains. You travel along the banks through a road made by blowing up monstrous rocks, which in many places hang declining over passengers and higher than houses, so that ’tis frightful to pass by them.”[590] _A Volunteer_ describes the mountains “as high and frightful as the Alps in Spain; so we had nothing pleasant to behold but the sky.”[591]

[Sidenote: THE GENERAL’S HUT.]

Our travellers halted for dinner at the General’s Hut, a small public-house nearly eighteen miles from Inverness.[592] Here, says Johnson, Wade had lodged “while he superintended the works upon the road.” I have seen it stated in a guide-book that on its site is built the Foyer’s Hotel, but this is a mistake. In the _Map of the King’s Roads made by General Wade_, dated 1746, “the General Hutt” (_sic_) is marked just where the road takes a sudden bend to the south, a short distance after which it passes the church of Burlassig. Dr. Garnett, who travelled through the Highlands at the end of the century, says that “the present public-house, which is still called the General’s Hut, is very near the place where Wade had a small house, which was afterwards used as an inn. It commands a delightful view up the lake.” The change of site must have been made, it would seem, between his visit and Johnson’s. The old inn was on the north-east or Inverness side of the church, whereas the Foyers Hotel is a little distance beyond it to the south-west. It is a pity that the ambition of landlords has not allowed the old name to remain. It was the only thing I found wanting in this comfortable hotel. Sir Walter Scott was surprised that “when these roads were made there was no care taken for inns. The King’s House and the General’s Hut are miserable places,” he adds, “but the project and plans were purely military.”[593] Johnson, however, was not dissatisfied with his entertainment. “We found,” he says, “the house not ill-stocked with provisions. We had eggs and bacon, and mutton, with wine, rum, and whisky. I had water.” The little church hard by Boswell describes as “the meanest parish kirk I ever saw. It is a shame it should be on a high road.” It might have been pleaded, perhaps, as an alleviation of its disgrace, that the high road had come to it and that it had not come to the high road. His reproach seems to have had some effect, for it has been removed to another place. The ruins, however, still remain. A middle-aged woman who dwells in the neighbourhood told me that “there was an old man living when she first came, who said he did not mind when it was a church, but his father did.”

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

[Sidenote: THE FALLS OF FOYERS.]