# Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)/Chapter 25

Auchinleck (November 2-8).
On Tuesday, November 2, our travellers having ordered a chaise from Kilmarnock, drove to Auchinleck, where they arrived in time for dinner. "We purpose," wrote Johnson that same evening, "to stay here some days, more or fewer, as we are used."
He said "we" advisedly, for he knew that not only between Lord Auchinleck and himself there was little in common, but that also between the father and son there was no freedom of intercourse. "My father," Boswell once complained, "cannot bear that his son should talk with him as a man." How uncomfortable was his position at home is shown by a letter which he wrote to his friend the Rev. Mr. Temple in September, 1775:
"I came to Auchinleck on Monday last, and I have patiently lived at it till Saturday evening. . . . It is hardly credible how difficult it is for a man of my sensibility to support existence in the family where I now am. My father, whom I really both respect and affectionate (if that is a word, for it is a different feeling from that which is expressed by love, which I can say of you from my soul), is so different from me. We divaricate so much, as Dr. Johnson said, that I am often hurt when, I dare say, he means no harm: and he has a method of treating me which makes me feel myself like a timid boy, which to Boswell (comprehending all that my character does in my own imagination and in that of a wonderful number of mankind) is intolerable. His wife too, whom in my conscience I cannot condemn for any capital bad quality, is so narrow-minded, and, I don't know how, so set upon keeping him under her own management, and so suspicious and so sourishly tempered that it requires the utmost exertion of practical philosophy to keep myself quiet. I however have done so all this week to admiration: nay, I have appeared good-humoured; but it has cost me drinking a considerable quantity of strong beer to dull my faculties."
It can scarcely be doubted that he is describing the position Which he himself held at home, in an essay which he published in the London Magazine in 1781 (p. 253):
"I knew a father who was a violent Whig, and used to attack his son for being a Tory, upbraiding him with being deficient in 'noble sentiments of liberty,' while at the same time he made this son live under his roof in such bondage, that he was not only afraid to stir from home without leave, like a child, but durst scarcely open ​his mouth in his father's presence. This was sad living. Yet I would rather see such an excess of awe than a degree of familiarity between father and son by which all reverence is destroyed."
Lord Auchinlcck had taken unto himself a second wife on the very day of his son's marriage. She was, in all likelihood, in the house at the time of Johnson's visit, but neither by him nor Boswell is she once mentioned. She remained, no doubt, silent and insignificant. With their reception they must have been satisfied on the whole, as they prolonged their stay till the sixth day, in spite of the famous altercation which Boswell's piety forbade him to record at any length. That only one such scene should have occurred speaks well for the self-control both of host and guest. To Boswell Johnson had quickly become attached. "Give me your hand," he said to him in the first weeks of their acquaintance, "I have taken a liking to you." A month or so later he added, "There are few people to whom I take so much as to you." But Lord Auchinleck, though he might have respected he never could have liked. No men were more unlike in everything but personal appearance, than Boswell and his father. The old man had none of that "facility of manners," of which, according to Adam Smith, the son "was happily possessed." Whence he got it we are nowhere told—perhaps from his mother. It certainly was not from his paternal grandfather, the old advocate, "who was a slow, dull man of unwearied perseverance and immeasurable length in his speeches. It was alleged he never understood a cause till he had lost it thrice." There were those who attributed Boswell's eccentricities to his great grandmother, Veronica, Countess of Kincardine, a Dutch lady of the noble house of Sommelsdyck. "For this marriage," writes Ramsay of Ochtertyre, "their posterity paid dear, for most of them had peculiarities which they had better have wanted." He adds that "Boswell's behaviour on the occasion of the riots in Edinburgh about the Douglas cause, savoured so much of insanity, that it was generally imputed to his Dutch blood." Why madness was supposed to come from Holland I do not know. Sir William Temple, writing of that country, says: "In general all appetites and passions seem to run lower and cooler here than in other countries where I have conversed. Their tempers are not airy enough for joy or any unusual strains of ​pleasant humour, nor warm enough for love. This is talked of sometimes among the younger men, but as a thing they have heard of rather than felt; and as a discourse that becomes them rather than affects them." All this was the very reverse of Boswell's eager and wild youth, though perhaps not
AUCHINLECK.
unlike the character of his father and grandfather. There was one thing in common between Johnson and the old judge, both were sound scholars. At Auchinleck there was a library "which," says Boswell, "in curious editions of the Greek and Roman classics is, I suppose, not excelled by any private collection in Great Britain." ​Here Johnson found an edition of Anacreon which he had long sought in vain. "They had therefore much matter for conversation without touching on the fatal topics of difference." In all questions of Church and State they were wide as the poles asunder. In the perfect confidence which each man had in his own judgment there was nothing to choose between them.
"My father," writes Boswell, "was as sanguine a Whig and Presbyterian as Dr. Johnson was a Tory and Church-of-England man: and as he had not much leisure to lie informed of Dr. Johnson's great merits by reading his works, he had a partial and unfavourable notion of him, founded on his supposed political tenets; which were so discordant to his own, that instead of speaking of him with that respect to which he was entitled, he used to call him 'a Jacobite fellow.' Knowing all this, I should not have ventured to bring them together, had not my father, out of kindness to me, desired me to invite Dr. Johnson to his house. I was very anxious that all should be well ; and begged of my friend to avoid three topics, as to which they differed very widely; Whiggism, Presbyterianism, and—Sir John Pringle. He said courteously, 'I shall certainly not talk on subjects which I am told are disagreeable to a gentleman under whose roof I am; especially, I shall not do so to your father.'"
Yet with all Lord Auchinleck's gravity and contempt of his son's flightiness, he had known what it was not only to be young, but to be foolish. Like so many of the young Scotchmen of old, he had been sent to Holland to study civil law. Thence he had made his way to Paris, where he had played the fop. Years afterwards one of the companions of his youth, meeting his son at Lord Kames's table, "told him that he had seen his father strutting abroad in red-heeled shoes and red stockings. The lad was so much diverted with it that he could hardly sit on his chair for laughing." His appointment as judge he owed to that most corrupt of Whig ministers, the Duke of Newcastle, and he was as Whiggish as his patron. King William III., "one of the most worthless scoundrels that ever existed," according to Johnson, was to him the greatest hero in modern times. Presbyterianism he loved all the more because it was a cheap religion, and narrowed the power of the clergy. He laid it clown as a rule that a poor clergy was ever a pure clergy. He added that in former times they had timber communion cups and silver ministers, but now we were getting silver cups and timber ministers. According to Sir Walter Scott he carried "his Whiggery and Presbyte​rianism to such a height, that once, when a countryman came in to state some justice business, and being required to make his oath, declined to do so before his lordship, because he was not a covenanted magistrate—'Is that a' your objection, mon?' said the judge: 'come your ways in here, and we'll baith of us tak the solemn league and covenant together.' The oath was accordingly agreed and sworn to by both, and I dare say it was the last time it ever received such homage." He would have nothing to do with clearing his tongue of Scotticisms, or with smoothing and rounding his periods on the model of the English classical authors. "His Scotch was broad and vulgar." In one thing at all events he was sure of receiving Johnson's warm approval. He was a great planter of trees. "It was," he said, "his favourite recreation. In his vacations he used to prune with his own hands the trees which he himself had planted. Beginning at five in the morning, he wrought with his knife every spare hour. Of Auchinleck he was passionately fond." He was not the man to prefer Fleet Street to the beauties of Nature. "I perceive some dawnings of taste for the country," wrote his son on one of his visits to his old home. "I will force a taste for rural beauties." He never succeeded in the attempt, and though he often boasted of "walking among the rocks and woods of his ancestors," it was from a distance that he most admired them.
Rarely were two men more unlike. The old man had in excess that foresight which in Boswell was so largely wanting. He had built himself a new house, which Johnson describes as "very magnificent and very convenient;" but he had proceeded "so slowly and prudently that he hardly felt the expense." Across the front of it he put the inscription—
"It is," writes Boswell, "characteristic of the founder; but the animus æquus is, alas! not inheritable, nor the subject of devise. He always talked to me as if it were in a man's own power to attain it; but Dr. Johnson told me that he owned to him, when they were alone, his persuasion that it was in a great measure constitutional, or the effect of causes which do not depend on ourselves, and that Horace boasts too much when he says, æquum mi animum ipse parabo."
​He had, too, that sobriety of character in which his son was so conspicuously wanting. "His age, his office, and his character, had given him an acknowledged claim to great attention in whatever company he was, and he could ill brook any diminution of it." He was by no means deficient in humour, and in this respect father and son were alike. "He had a great many good stories, which he told uncommonly well, and he was remarkable for 'humour, incolumi gravitate,' as Lord Monboddo used to characterize it."
The contrast between his dignity and gravity, and Boswell's bustling and most comical liveliness, must have been as amusing as it was striking. His ignorance of his son's genius, and the contempt for him which he did not conceal, heightened the picture. Johnson's presence would have greatly added to the interest of the scene, for Boswell must have constantly wavered between his admiration of his idol and his awe of his father. A few years later Miss Burney met Boswell at Streatham, and thus describes him, no doubt with a good deal of exaggeration:
"He spoke the Scotch accent strongly. He had an odd mock solemnity of manner, that he had acquired imperceptibly from constantly thinking of and imitating Dr. Johnson. There was something slouching in his gait and dress, that wore an air, ridiculously enough, of purporting to personify the same model. His clothes were always too large for him; his hair or wig was constantly in a state of negligence; and he never for a moment sat still or upright upon a chair. When he met with Dr. Johnson he commonly forbore even answering anything that was said, or attending to anything that went forward, lest he should miss the smallest sound from that voice to which he paid such exclusive homage. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropt open to catch every syllable that might be uttered. The Doctor generally treated him as a schoolboy, whom without the smallest ceremony he pardoned or rebuked alternately."
It is probable that this description is heightened by Miss Burney's wounded vanity. Boswell had not read her Evelina, and when he was reproached by Johnson with being a Brangton—one of the characters in the novel—he did not know what was meant. She was as careful in recording the conversation that was about herself as Boswell was in recording Johnson's. Her great hero was herself. The voices to which she paid her homage were those in which she was praised and flattered.
In another place she describes "the singularity of his comic-serious face and manner." He himself has more than once drawn ​his own character. He was, he flattered himself, a citizen of the world; one who in his travels never felt himself from home. In that impudent Correspondence which he and his friend Andrew Erskine published when they were still almost lads, he thus describes himself:
"The author of the Ode to Tragedy is a most excellent man; he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness. His parts are bright; and his education has been good. He has travelled in post-chaises miles without number. He is fond of seeing much of the world. He eats of every good dish, especially apple-pie. He drinks old hock. He has a very fine temper. He is somewhat of an humorist, and a little tinctured with pride. He has a good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous He has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast. He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old. His shoes are neatly made, and he never wears spectacles."
We have a later description of him again by his own hand, as he was at the time of his tour with Johnson.
"Think, then (he says), of a gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant passion. He was then in his thirty-third year, and had been about four years happily married. His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father, a respectable judge, had pressed him into the profession of the law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties of human life. He had thought more than anybody supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. He had all Dr. Johnson's principles, with some degree of relaxation. He had rather too little, than too much prudence; and, his imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect was very different from the intention. He resembled sometimes
The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.'"
Johnson celebrated his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness, his acuteness, his gaiety of conversation, and civility of manners. "He was," he said, "the best travelling companion in the world." According to Burke, "his good nature was so natural to him that he had no merit in possessing it. A man might as well assume to himself merit in possessing an excellent constitution." Reynolds loved him so well that "he left him £200 in his will, to be expended, if he thought proper, in the purchase of a picture at the sale of his paintings, to be kept for his sake." In a memoir of him in the Scots Magazine he is described as "a most pleasant companion, affectionate and friendly; but, particularly in his latter days, he betrayed a vanity which seemed to predominate." Tytler ​praises "his sprightly fancy and whimsical eccentricity," which "agreeably tempered the graver conversation" of Adam Smith or Hugh Blair at the small and select parties given by Lord Kames.
He was welcome everywhere but at his own father's house. Neither was he the better thought of by the old man on account of the great Englishman whom he brought with him. Everything however went off smoothly for a day or two, but the host and his guest at length came in collision over Lord Auchinleck's collection of medals. The scene is thus described by Boswell, who witnessed it:
"Oliver Cromwell's coin unfortunately introduced Charles the First and Toryism. They became exceedingly warm and violent, and I was very much distressed by being present at such an altercation between two men, both of whom I reverenced; yet I durst not interfere. It would certainly be very unbecoming in me to exhibit my honoured father and my respected friend, as intellectual gladiators, for the entertainment of the public; and, therefore, I suppress what would, I dare say, make an interesting scene in this dramatic sketch—this account of the transit of Johnson over the Caledonian Hemisphere."
Ramsay of Ochtertyre says, that the year after this famous altercation, Lord Auchinleck "told him with warmth that the great Dr. Johnson, of whom he had heard wonders, was just a dominie, and the worst-bred dominie he had ever seen." The account which Sir Walter Scott gives is very dramatic, though no doubt somewhat embellished.
"Old Lord Auchinleck (he writes) was an able lawyer, a good scholar, after the manner of Scotland, and highly valued his own advantages as a man of good estate and ancient family; and, moreover, he was a strict Presbyterian and Whig of the old Scottish cast. This did not prevent his being a terribly proud aristocrat; and great was the contempt he entertained and expressed for his son James, for the nature of his friendships and the character of the personages of whom he was engoné one after another. 'There's nae hope for Jamie, mon,' he said to a friend. 'Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? He's done wi' Paoli—he's off wi' the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon?' Here the old judge summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. 'A dominie, mon—an auld dominie: he keeped a schǔle, and cau'd it an acaadamy."
The full force of Lord Auchinleck's contempt is only seen when we understand the position of a dominie. The character of a schoolmaster, generally, according to Johnson, was less honour​able in Scotland than in England. But the dominie, or tutor in a family, was still less esteemed. "He was raised," writes Sir Walter Scott, "from a humble class to a society where, whatever his personal attainments might be, he found himself placed at a humiliating distance from anything like a footing of equality. His remuneration was scanty in the extreme, and consisting (as if to fill up the measure of his dependence) not entirely of a fixed salary, but partly of the precarious prospect of future preferment in the Church. The Scotch dominie was assuredly one of the most pitiable of human beings." It is a curious and perhaps a somewhat suspicious fact, that a very few years before Sir Walter supplied Mr. Croker with this amusing story about the old judge, he had put on record in the pages of the Quarterly Review the following anecdote: "When the old Scots judge Lord Auchinleck first heard of Johnson's coming to visit him at his rural castellum, he held up his hands in astonishment, and cried out, 'Our Jeemy's clean aff the hooks now! would ony body believe it? he's bringing down a dominie wi' him—an auld dominie.'" This looks like a different version of the same story. Moreover, Boswell tells us that his father had desired him to invite him to his house. When Johnson called his school at Lichfield an academy, he does not seem to have used the term pretentiously, for in his Dictionary he defines the word under one of its meanings as "a place of education in contradistinction to the universities or public schools." It does not seem likely, moreover, that Lord Auchinleck had any feeling of contempt for Pascal Paoli, a man of good family, who for years had headed a rebellion against the tyranny first of Genoa and afterwards of France. He had visited Auchinleck two years before Johnson, and had been well received. Boswell, writing to Garrick on September 18, 1771, said: "I have just been enjoying the very great happiness of a visit from my illustrious friend, Pascal Paoli. He was two nights at Auchinleck, and you may figure the joy of my worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican hero in our romantic groves. Count Burgynski, the Polish ambassador, accompanied him." Poland's days of sending ambassadors had nearly drawn to an end, for the first partition of the country was made in the following year. It was a strange chance which brought the last Corsican patriot and the last Polish ambas​sador to this Ayrshire mansion. One thing only was wanting. Would that Burns that day had played truant and had wandered up "Lugar's winding stream" as far as Auchinleck! It would, indeed, have formed an interesting group the stiff old Scotch judge and his famous son, the great Corsican patriot and the Pole, with the peasant-lad gazing at them with his eyes full of beauty and wonder. Paoli's name is well-nigh forgotten now, but he and his Corsicans deeply stirred the hearts of our forefathers. Boswell, by a private subscription in Scotland, had sent out to him in one week £700 worth of ordnance—"a tolerable train of artillery." His account of his tour in that island had been widely read. Even his father "was rather fond of it. 'James,' he said, 'had taken a tout on a new horn.'" Whether Lord Auchinleck abused Paoli "as a land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican," or admired him as he admired other great patriots, the rest of Sir Walter Scott's account of the great altercation may be true enough:
"The controversy between Tory and Covenanter raged with great fury, and ended in Johnson's pressing upon the old judge the question, what good Cromwell, of whom lie had said something derogatory, had ever done to his country; when, after being much tortured, Lord Auchinleck at last spoke out, 'God, Doctor! he gart kings ken that they had a lith in their neck'—he taught kings they had a joint in their necks."
This story did not, I believe, appear in print till the year 1831, when it was given as a note by Scott in Mr. Croker's edition of Boswell. Fifty years earlier it had been told in somewhat different words of Quin the player, who had said that "on a thirtieth of January every king in Europe would rise with a crick in his neck." Davies, who records the anecdote, says that it had been attributed to Voltaire, but unjustly. It is possible, and even not unlikely, that we have but a Scotch version of an English saying. Cromwell himself, in his letter to the governor of Edinburgh Castle, had shown that he too saw this consequence of his great deed. "The civil authority," he writes, "turned out a Tyrant in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honour, and all Tyrants in the world look at with fear."
In one happy though impudent retort, Lord Auchinleck was very successful.
"Dr. Johnson challenged him (writes Boswell) to point out any theological ​works of merit written by Presbyterian ministers in Scotland. My father, whose studies did not lie much in that way, owned to me afterwards, that he was somewhat at a loss how to answer, but that luckily he recollected having read in catalogues the title of Durham on the Galatians; upon which he boldly said, 'Pray, Sir, have your read Mr. Durham's excellent commentary on the Galatians?' 'No, Sir,' said Dr. Johnson. By this lucky thought my father kept him at bay, and for some time enjoyed his triumph; but his antagonist soon made a retort, which I forbear to mention."
In the long list of Durham's theological works in the British Museum catalogue I find no mention of this book on the Galatians. The old judge, it is clear, had not forgotten in the years which he had sat on the bench the arts of the advocate. In Rowlandson's Caricatures there is a humorous picture of The Contest at Auchinleck. Johnson is drawn felling his opponent with a huge liturgy, having made him drop two books equally big, entitled Calvin and Whiggism. On the floor are lying the medals over which the dispute had begun, while Boswell is at the door in an attitude of despair, with his Journal falling from his hands.
One figure was wanting to make the picture complete. Of the three topics on which Johnson had been warned not to touch only two had been introduced. "In the course of their altercation," writes Boswell, "Whiggism and Presbyterianism, Toryism and Episcopacy, were terribly buffeted. My worthy hereditary friend, Sir John Pringle, never having been mentioned, happily escaped without a bruise." We could have wished that he had been mentioned, for though we know of the dislike which existed between the two men, yet as he has never "hitched" in one of Johnson's strong sayings, he has scarcely attained that fame which he deserved.
Towards Lord Auchinleck Johnson bore no resentment. With him the heat of altercation soon passed away, but not the memory of the hospitality which he had received in his house. In not a single word spoken or written has he attacked him. On the contrary, in his Journey to the Western Islands, he only mentions him to praise him. When, six years later, he published the first four volumes of his Lives of the Poets, he wrote to Boswell: "Write me word to whom I shall send sets of Lives; would it please Lord Auchinleck?" A few months after this he wrote to him: "Let me know what reception you have from your father, and the state of his health. Please him as much as you can, and add no pain to his last years." The old lord was not so placable. He had that ​"want of tenderness which," said Johnson, "is want of parts." This part of his character is seen in the following anecdote recorded of him by his son:
"I mentioned to Johnson a respectable person of a very strong mind, who had little of that tenderness which is common to human nature; as an instance of which, when I suggested to him that he should invite his son, who had been settled ten years in foreign parts, to come home and pay him a visit, his answer was, 'No, no, let him mind his business.' Johnson. 'I do not agree with him, Sir, in this. Getting money is not all a man's business : to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.'"
He had what Boswell calls "the dignified courtesy of an old Baron," and when Johnson left "was very civil to him, and politely attended him to his post chaise." But he was not in the least soothed by the compliments which he paid him in his book. Boswell had hoped that he might be moved. Writing to Johnson just after it had been published, he said: "You have done Auchinleck much honour, and have, I hope, overcome my father, who has never forgiven your warmth for monarchy and episcopacy. I am anxious to see how your pages will operate upon him." His anxious wish was grievously disappointed. A few months later he wrote to his friend Temple: "My father is most unhappily dissatisfied with me. … He harps on my going over Scotland with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous!) and wandering (or some such phrase) to London. How hard it is that I am totally excluded from parental comfort! I have a mind to go to Auchinleck next autumn, and try what living in a mixed stupidity of attention to common objects and restraint from expressing any of my own feelings can do with him." When his father and Johnson were both dead he indulged in the pious hope that "as they were both worthy Christian men, they had met in happiness. But I must observe," he adds, "injustice to my friend's political principles and my own, that they have met in a place where there is no room for Whiggism." Johnson, it is true, "always said the first Whig was the Devil," but on the other hand, some Presbyterian who drew up an epitaph on Lochiel, declared in it that he "is now a Whig in heaven."
That pride in his ancient blood, which Boswell boasted was his predominant passion, was very strong in the old lord. In the son, if it really existed in any strength, it was happily overpowered by ​a host of other and better feelings. He had travelled widely, he had seen a great variety of men, some of them among the most famous of their age, and had learnt to value genius without troubling himself about its pedigree. His successors at Auchinleck had something of the narrowness of the old judge. "His eldest son, Sir Alexander Boswell," wrote Sir Walter Scott, "was a proud man, and like his grandfather, thought that his father lowered himself by his deferential suit and service to Johnson. I have observed he disliked any allusion to the book or to Johnson himself, and I have heard that Johnson's fine picture by Sir Joshua was sent upstairs out of the sitting apartments." He was not too proud a man to write a poem on the anniversary of the Accession of George IV., and what is George IV. now? It was not from any dulness of mind that he did not value his father's book. "He had," says Lockhart, "all Bozzy's cleverness, good-humour, and joviality, without one touch of his meaner qualities, wrote some popular songs, which he sang capitally, and was moreover a thorough bibliomaniac." It was due to him and a friend, that the Burns monument at Ayr was erected. They summoned a public meeting, but no one attended except themselves. Little daunted they appointed a chairman, proposed resolutions, carried them unanimously, passed a vote of thanks, and issued subscription lists. More than £2,000 was subscribed, and the monument was opened by Sir Alexander shortly before his death. That he was not wanting in tenderness of heart is shown by some of his poems. How pretty is the following verse in an address by an aged father to his children:—
"The auld will speak, the young maun hear, Be cantie, but be gude and leal; Your ain ills aye hae heart to bear, Anither's aye hae heart to feel.
So, ere I set, I'll see ye shine; I'll see ye triumph ere I fa'; My parting breath shall boast you mine— Good night, and jo be wi' ye a'."
Lockhart goes, however, too far when he exalts him in comparison with his father. Boswell, I feel sure, would never have been guilty of the act which involved his son in the unhappy duel in which he lost his life. In two scurrilous newspapers he had ​secretly defamed his kinsman, Mr. James Stuart, of Dunearn, "with whom he had long been on good terms." Though the articles were written in a disguised hand, the authorship was detected. He received a challenge from the injured man, and at the first shot fell mortally wounded. He dined with Scott a day or two before the duel, and "though Charles Matthews (the famous comedian) was present, poor Sir Alexander Boswell's songs, jokes, and anecdotes exhibited no symptom of eclipse."
His only son, Sir James Boswell, the last male descendant of the author of the immortal Life, shared his father's illiberal feelings about Johnson. Miss Macleod of Macleod told me that when she was on a visit at Auchinleck, he said to her one day that he did not know how he should name one of his race-horses. She suggested Boswell's Johnsoniana, which made him very angry. He was, I learnt, a man of great natural ability, who, had he chosen, might have become distinguished. His feeling of soreness against his grandfather was partly due to another cause than dislike of hero-worship. Boswell, in an access of that particular kind of folly which he called "feudal enthusiasm," had entailed his estates on the heirs male of his father to the exclusion of his own nearer female descendants. Sir James, who had no sons, saw that Auchinleck on his death would pass away from his daughters to his cousin, Thomas Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck's grandson by his second son David. He managed to get the settlement upset on the plea that in the deed the first five letters of the word irredeemably were written upon an erasure. It is not impossible that the lawyer who drew it up, not liking the provision, intentionally contrived this loop-hole.
Among Boswell's male descendants, his second son James was, so far as I know, the only one who was not ashamed of the Life of Johnson. He supplied notes to the later editions. His father, writing of him when he was eleven years old, says: "My second son is an extraordinary boy; he is much of his father (vanity of vanities)." Croker describes him as "very convivial, and in other respects like his father—though altogether on a smaller scale." According to Lockhart, he was "a man of considerable learning and admirable social qualities. To him Sir Walter Scott ​was warmly attached. He died suddenly in the prime of life, about a fortnight before his brother."
When Boswell, at the age of twenty-seven, published his Account of Corsica, he boasted in his preface that "he cherished the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object to the noblest minds in all ages." When he saw his Life of Johnson reach its second edition, he said with a frankness which is almost touching, "I confess that I am so formed by nature and by habit, that to restrain the effusion of delight on having obtained such fame, to me would be truly painful. Why then should I suppress it? Why 'out of the abundance of the heart' should I not speak?" He goes on to mention the spontaneous praise which he has received from eminent persons, "much of which," he adds, "I have under their hands to be reposited in my archives at Auchinleck." How little did he foresee that his executors, with a brutish ignorance worthy of perpetual execration, would destroy his manuscripts! If Oliver Goldsmith had had children and grand-children, they too, when they read of his envy and his vanity, when they were told that "in conversation he was an empty, noisy, blundering rattle," might have blushed to own that they were sprung from the author of The Deserted Village and The Vicar of Wakefield.
It is a melancholy thing that Boswell's descendants should have seen their famous ancestor's faults so clearly as to have been unable to enjoy that pride which was so justly their due, in being sprung from a man of such real, if curious genius. Was it nothing to have written the best biography which the world has ever seen? Nothing to have increased more than any writer of his generation "the public stock of harmless pleasure?" Nothing to have "exhibited" with the greatest skill "a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near half a century?" Nothing to have been the delight of men of the greatest and most varied genius? Nothing to be read wherever the English tongue is spoken, and, as seems likely, as long as the English tongue shall last? Sume superbiam quæsitam meritis, "Assume the honours justly thine," we would say to each one of his race.
How widely Boswell's influence is felt is shown in a story which was told me by Sir Charles Sikes, the benevolent inventor ​of the Post Office Savings Banks, and no mean Johnsonian. One day he had gone under an archway in Fleet Street to shun a shower, as Burke might have gone. Being "knowing and conversible," he fell into talk with a sergeant of police who was also taking shelter, and whose tongue showed that he was an Irishman. He came, he said, from the west of Ireland. When he was a boy the parish priest had lent him a copy of the Life of Johnson. He had read it again and again, till at last the wish grew so strong upon him to see with his own eyes the scenes which in the pages of the book were so familiar to him, that he came to London, not knowing what employment he should find, but bent on seeing Fleet Street. What pilgrimages have not men made from the other side of the Atlantic to the same spots! With their Boswell in their hands they have wandered by Charing Cross, "with its full tide of human existence;" up the Strand, "through the greatest series of shops in the world;" under Temple Bar, where Johnson's and Goldsmith's names did not mingle with those of the Scotch rebels; along Fleet Street, with "its very animated appearance," to the courts and lanes and taverns where the spirits of the men who gathered round the great Lexicographer seem still to linger. The Boswells are proud of their descent from a man who fell at Flodden Field. There are thousands and ten thousands of Scotchmen who got knocked on their heads in border forays, but only one who wrote the Life of Johnson. "The chief glory of every people arises from its authors," and among Scotch authors Sir Walter Scott alone equals Boswell in the extent of his popularity. The genius of Burns lies hidden from most Englishmen in the dialect in which his finest poetry is written. Never did one man of letters do another a more shameful wrong than when Macaulay laboured at the ridiculous paradox that the first of biographers was "a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect." He was thirty years old when he wrote this. Yet, to borrow Johnson's words, it was such stuff as a young man talks when he first begins to think himself a clever fellow, and he ought to have been whipped for it. The ​worst of it is that Macaulay, like Rousseau, talked his nonsense so well that it still passes for gospel with all those who have advanced as far as reading, but have not as yet attained to thinking. We may feel thankful that he did not with his overpowering common sense go on to overwhelm the memory of Goldsmith.
In the price set on autographs we have a means of measuring in some fashion the estimation in which men are held by posterity. The standard is but a rough one, however, for it is affected by the number of their writings which chance to have been preserved: judging by it, Boswell's rank is very high. There were, probably, few men whose career he more envied than that of Lord Bute's "errand-goer," Alexander Wedderburne, who rose to be Lord Loughborough, Earl of Rosslyn and Lord High Chancellor of England. Yet a letter of his I have recently seen offered for sale at ten shillings and sixpence, while Boswell's was marked nine guineas. While I exult at seeing that one author equals eighteen Lord Chancellors, I sometimes sigh over the high prices which have hitherto kept me from obtaining a specimen of the handwriting of a man at whose works I have so long laboured.
It is to be hoped that the day will at length come when those in whose veins Boswell's blood still flows will take that just and reasonable view of their famous forefather which will lead them, from time to time, to throw open "the rocks and woods," and even "the stately house" of Auchinleck to strangers from afar. It was he who "Johnsonised the land," and they therefore should have some indulgence for the enthusiasm which he created. "The sullen dignity of the castle with which Johnson was delighted" they should not keep altogether to themselves. Another famous man had beheld those ruins also. "Since Paoli stood upon our old castle," wrote Boswell to a friend," it has an additional dignity." Who would not like to stand upon it also, and to see the Lugar running beneath," bordered by high rocks shaded with wood?" Into this beautiful stream falls "a pleasing brook," to use Johnson's odd description of a rivulet which has cut a deep passage through the sandstone. "It runs," he adds, "by a red rock, out of which has been hewn a very agreeable and commodious summer-house." I have been told that the meeting of the waters is a scene of striking beauty. Then there are "the venerable old trees under the shade of which," writes Boswell, "my ancestors had walked," and the groves where, as he told Johnson, it was his intention to ​erect a monument to his "reverend friend." "Sir," he answered, little flattered by the prospect of "a lapidary inscription," "I hope to see your grand-children." Who would not gladly stroll along Lord Auchinleck's via sacra, "that road which he made to the church, for above three miles, on his own estate, through a range of well-inclosed farms, with a row of trees on each side of it?" The avenue is composed mainly of oaks and beeches, planted alternately; but the finest of the trees were brought down a few years ago in a great storm which swept over the country. Only one or two small farms remain, but there are the ruins of another. From the road a most pleasant view is seen, grassy slopes running down to the Lugar, with hedge-rows and trees growing in them after the English fashion. Across the river the ground rises rapidly in tilled fields and meadows and groves to a high range of hills. To the south-west lies the village of Ochiltree, whence Scott perhaps derived old Edie's name in the Antiquary.
The manse still stands where Johnson dined with the Rev. John Dun, who had been Boswell's dominie, and had been rewarded for his services by the presentation to the living of Auchinleck. He rashly attacked before his guest the Church of England, and "talked of fat bishops and drowsy deans. Dr. Johnson was so highly offended, that he said to him, 'Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot.'" Dun must have complained to Boswell of being thus publicly likened to the proverbial Hottentot, for in the second edition of the Tour to the Hebrides his name is suppressed. The manse has been enlarged since those days, and surrounded with a delightful garden which might excite the envy, if not of a drowsy dean, at all events of a south country vicar. In the venerable minister, Dr. James Chrystal, who has lived there for more than fifty years, Johnson would have found a man "whom, if he should have quarrelled with him, he would have found the most difficulty how to abuse."
The parish church where Johnson refused to attend Boswell and his father at public worship has been rebuilt. In the churchyard stands a fine old beech which might have been called venerable even a hundred years ago. There, too, is the vault of the Boswells with their coat-of-arms engraved on it, and their motto, Vraye Foy. In a niche cut in the solid rock lies Boswell's body. He died in London, at his house in Great Portland Street, but in accordance with the direction in his will he was buried "in the family burial-​place in the church of Auchinleck." Though the vault is now at a little distance from the church, yet in the old building, which did not occupy precisely the same site, it was under a room at the back of the Boswells' pew. On a wall in the churchyard I noticed a curiously-carved stone with the following inscription:
M
G.W.
1621 M. G.
THIS STONE WAS ERECTED 1621 IN MEMORY OF THE REVD. GEORGE WALKER
WHO WAS PASTOR OF THIS PARISH.
REPAIRED BY OLD MORTALITY
IN HIS DAY
AND RENEWED AND PLACED HERE IN 1855.
"Auchinleck," said the landlady of my inn, "is the very heart of the Covenanters' district." Hard by, at Airdsmoss, the founder of the Cameronians, with seven or eight of his followers, was slain in July, 1681. In the churchyard lies buried a man of a very different type of character—William Murdoch, the inventor of gas. Two of Boswell's tenants were James and William Murdoch. They and their forefathers had possessed their farms for many generations. Perhaps not only the Life of Boswell, but illumination by gas takes its rise from Auchinleck.
The village consists mainly of one long street of solidly-built stone houses; the older ones thatched and often white-washed, the modern ones slated. At the back are good gardens well stocked with fruit trees. Bare feet are far more common here than in the Highlands or Hebrides. All the children, with scarcely an exception, and many of the women, go bare-footed. As I passed down the street a "roup," or sale by auction, was going on before the house of a deceased "baker, violin-maker, clock-mender, blood-letter, dentist, geologist, and collector of coins." The auctioneer, standing on the doorstep of this departed worthy, who at one and ​the same time had played many parts, dispersed his motley goods to the four quarters of heaven. The best of his violins, for he had had some of considerable value, had been sent for sale to Glasgow. 1 stayed in the Railway Hotel, a curious old house, which boasted of two sitting-rooms and one bed-room. It was clean and comfortable, and in my courteous landlady I found a woman of sense and education. She quoted Sartor Resartus, and spoke with anger of Mr. Froude's Life of Carlyle. In Scotland the traveller finds book-learning far more generally diffused than in England.
In Boswell's time Auchinleck, he tells us, was pronounced Affleck. His grand-daughter, who died in 1836, informed Mr. Croker that in her time it had come to be pronounced as it is written. I learnt however from Dr. Chrystal that "the name Affléck is still quite common as applied to the parish, and even Auchinleck House is as often called Place Affléck as otherwise."
A lad whom I questioned on the subject told me that the old people call it Affléck but the young Auchinleck. The old pronunciation will no doubt soon disappear.
Boswell had been a kind landlord. Johnson, in the early days of their acquaintance, "had recommended to him a liberal kindness to his tenantry, as people over whom the proprietor was placed by Providence." The advice was congenial to his natural disposition. In his will, which he made ten years before his death, he says: "As there are upon the estate of Auchinleck several tenants whose families have possessed their farms for many generations, I do by these presents grant leases for nineteen years and their respective lives to"—here follow the names of eight tenants. He continues:
"And I do beseech all the succeeding heirs of entail to be kind to the tenants, and not to turn out old possessors to get a little more rent." We may venture to express a hope that his descendants, if they have slighted him as an author, have always honoured and followed him as a landlord.
* ↑ Letters of Boswell to Temple, p. 255.
* ↑ Ib., p. 215.
* ↑ Correspondence of Boswell and Erskine, ed. 1879, p. 26.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen of the Eighteenth Century, i. 161.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen of the Eighteenth Century, i. 161, 173.
* ↑ Temple's Works, ed. 1757, i. 160.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen, i. 161. The Earl of Chesterfield, writing to his son in the year 1751, says: "I do not indeed wear feathers and red heels, which would ill suit my age; but I take care to have my clothes well made." Letters to his Son, ed. 1774, iii. 227.
* ↑ Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1874, p. 531.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen, &c., i, 170; ii. 556.
* ↑ Boswell's Johnson, v. 382, n. 2.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen, &c., ii. 543.
* ↑ Ib. i. 166.
* ↑ Letters of Boswell to Temple, pp. 216, 219.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen, &c., i. 166.
* ↑ "The peace you seek is here—where is it not? If your own mind be equal to the lot." Croker.
* ↑ Memoirs of Dr. Burney, ii. 191–4.
* ↑ Madame d'Arblay's Diary, ed. 1843, v. 166.
* ↑ Boswell's Correspondence with Erskine, ed. 1879, p. 36.
* ↑ Boswell's Johnson, i. 11; iii. 362; v. 52.
* ↑ Scots Magazine, 1797, p. 292.
* ↑ Tytler's Life of Lord Kames, ii. 228.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen, i. 176.
* ↑ Crazy.
* ↑ Loup is a cognate word with leap, and signifies to run. A landlouper is a runagate; one constantly shifting from one plate to another.
* ↑ Johnson's Works, ix. 158.
* ↑ Quarterly Review, No. 71, p. 225.
* ↑ Ib.
* ↑ Carrick Correspondence, i. 436.
* ↑ Letters of Boswell to Temple, p. 156.
* ↑ Scotland and Scotsmen, &c., i. 172. Tout is the blast of a horn.
* ↑ Davies's Life of Carrick, ii. 115.
* ↑ Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, ed. 1857, ii. 209.
* ↑ Croker's Boswell, 8vo. ed. p. 826.
* ↑ Letters of Boswell to Temple, p. 207.
* ↑ Quarterly Review, No. 71, p. 209.
* ↑ Croker's Correspondence, ii. 32.
* ↑ Lockhart's Life of Scott, v. 336.
* ↑ C. Rogers 's Modern Scottish Minstrel, 1870, p. 158.
* ↑ Lord Cockburn's Memorials, pp. 380, 392, and Lockhart's Scott, vii. 33.
* ↑ Rogers's Boswelliana, p. 195, and Notes and Queries, 3rd Series, vii. 197.
* ↑ Letters of Boswell to Temple, p. 315.
* ↑ Croker's Boswell, p. 620.
* ↑ Lockhart's Life of Scott, vii. 33.
* ↑ Macaulay's Miscellaneous Writings, ed. 1871, p. 369.
* ↑ Johnson imagines Burke falling into chance conversations on two occasions; once on shunning a shower under a shed, and another time on stepping aside to take shelter from a drove of oxen.—Life of Johnson, iv. 275; v. 34.
* ↑ "Johnson. I remember once being with Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey. While we surveyed the Poets' Corner I said to him, 'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.' when we go to Temple Bar he stopped me, pointed to the heads upon it, and slily whispered me, 'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis," Ib. ii. 238.
* ↑ See Boswell's will in Rogers's Boswelliana, p. 185.
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