LOVE AFFAIRS--LITERARY CLUB. 1766-73
"How happy could I be with either, Were t"other dear charmer away."--GAY.
"Love," wrote Madame de Stael, "is with man a thing apart, "tis woman"s whole existence." This is not true at least of Boswell, for his love affairs fill as large a part in his life as in that of Benjamin Constant. A most confused chapter withal, and one that luckily was not known to Macaulay, whose colours would otherwise have been more brilliant. We find Bozzy paying his addresses at one and the same time to at least eight ladies, exclusive as this is of sundry minor divinities of a fleeting and more temporary nature not calling here for allusion. His first divinity was the gra.s.s-widow of Moffat, and here Temple had been compelled to remonstrate in spite of all the lover"s philandering about her freedom from her husband, who had used her ill.
Were she unfaithful, he declares her worthy to be "pierced with a Corsican dagger," but in March he has found it too much like a "settled plan of licentiousness," discovering her to be an ill-bred rompish girl, debasing his dignity, without refinement, though handsome and lively.
Then there is the quarrel and the reconciliation, she vowing she loved him more than ever she had done her husband, but meeting with opposition from his brother David and others, who furnished the love-sick heart of her adorer with examples of her faithlessness such as made him recoil.
He vows now his frailties are at an end, and he resolves to turn out an admirable member of society. He had broken with her as with the gardener"s daughter a year ago--an everlasting lesson to him.
By March 1767 the reigning favourite was Miss Bosville of Yorkshire. But his lot being cast in Scotland would be an objection to the beauty; then we hear of a young lady in the vicinity of whose claims Lord Auchinleck approved, because their lands lay happily together for family extension.
She was just eighteen, pious, good-tempered and genteel, and for four days she had been on a visit to "the romantick groves" of his ancestors, when suddenly the scene is changed for the Sienese _signora_ of whom we heard upon his travels. "My Italian angel," he cries, "is constant; I had a letter from her but a few days ago, which made me cry." He conjures his friend Temple to come to him, and "on that Arthur Seat where our youthful fancies roved abroad shall we take counsel together."
The local divinity we learn is Miss Blair of Adamtown; he has been drinking her health, and aberrations from sobriety and virtue have ensued, but he thought things would be brought to a climax were Temple to visit her. A long letter of commission follows, the envoy is instructed to appear as his old friend, praising him to Miss Blair for his good qualities. Temple is adjured to dwell upon his odd, inconstant, impetuous nature, how he is accustomed to women of intrigue, and he is to ask of the fair one if she does not think there is insanity in the Boswell family. She is to hear of his travels, his acquaintance with foreign princes, Voltaire and Rousseau, his desire to have a house of his own; and then he diverges into practicality when he desires his friend to "study the mother," and take notes of all that pa.s.sed, as it might have the effect of fixing the fate of the lover. Temple, it may be imagined, did not interpret his commission in such a literal spirit, and inconstancy and insanity could hardly be recommendations in Miss Blair"s eyes. That such should be the case,--outside the confessions of Mr Rochester in _Jane Eyre_,--would appear to the commissioner an obvious fact.
A silence followed on Temple"s departure from the divinity. Boswell dreaded a certain nabob, "a man of copper," as his rival. Then he believed the fair offended by his own Spanish stateliness and gravity; and again a letter, "written with all the warmth of Italian affection,"
restores the _signora_ to the first place, from which she is deposed by a note from Miss Blair, explaining that his letter had been delayed a week at the Ayr post-office. Then fresh ravings, clouded by the belief that she is cunning and sees his weakness, for three people at Ayr have a.s.sured him she is a jilt, and he is shocked at the risk he has run, a warning for the future to him against "indulging the least fondness for a Scotch la.s.s." He has, he feels, a soul of a more Southern frame, and some Englishwoman ought to be sensible of his merit, though the Dutch translator of his _Tour_, Mademoiselle de Zuyl, has been writing to him.
Random talking is his dread, he must guard against it, and Miss Blair revives. "I must have her learn the harpsichord," he cries, "and French; she shall be one of the finest women in the island." Later on they have had a long meeting, of which s.p.a.ce only prevents the inimitable reproduction,--"squeezing and kissing her fine hand, while she looked at me with those beautiful black eyes." He meets her at the house of Lord Kames, he sees her at _Oth.e.l.lo_--she was in tears at the affecting scenes, and "rather leaned" to him (he thought), and "the jealous Moor described my own soul." But true love did never yet run smooth; he has been "as wild as ever. Trust me in time coming; I will give you my word of honour." Then--curious psychological trait--"to-morrow I shall be happy with my devotions."
By the beginning of 1768 he fears all is over. A rumour--a false one as it proved--had reached him that the divinity was to be married to Sir Alexander Gilmour, M.P. for Midlothian. He gets friendly with the nabob, warms him with old claret, and bewails with him their hapless devotion.
They agree to propose in turn, and, being in turn rejected, he feels sure that "a Howard, or some other of the n.o.blest in the kingdom" is to be his fate. The Dutch translator again holds the field, to be soon dismissed for her frivolity and her infidelity. Then Miss d.i.c.k of Prestonfield reigns with solid qualifications--she lacks a fortune, but is fine, young, healthy, and amiable. A visit to Holland, to finally decide on the Mademoiselle"s claims, was proposed, but his father, warned in time, would not consent. Temple, too, was against this, and "Temple thou reasonest well," he cries, and thinks his abnegation will be a solace to his worthy father on his circuit. Freed now from Miss Blair and the Dutch divinity, he is devoted to _la belle Irlandaise_, "just sixteen, with the sweetest countenance and a Dublin education."
Never till now had he been so truly in love; every flower is united, and she is a rose without a thorn. Her name "Mary Anne" he has carved upon a tree, and cutting off a lock of her hair she had promised Bozzy not to marry a lord before March, or forget him. "Sixteen," he says; "innocence and gaiety make me quite a Sicilian swain."
His book had dissipated his professional energies, and he had even taken to gaming. Incidentally we learn that he had lost more than he could pay, and that Mr Sheridan had advanced enough to clear him, on a promise that he should not engage in play for three years. Mary Anne has added to his complications by her forgetfulness, and the local candidate Miss Blair reappears. Favoured as she was by his father, it would have been easy to bring things to a climax, but on her mother"s part there was some not unnatural coldness over his indiscreet talk about his love of the heiress. Bozzy was a convivial knight-errant in what was called "Saving the ladies." At clubs and gatherings any member would toast his idol in a b.u.mper, and then another champion would enter his peerless Dulcinea in two b.u.mpers, to be routed by the original toper taking off four. The deepest drinker "saved his lady," as the phrase ran; though, says George Thomson speaking of the old concerts in St Cecilia"s Hall, at the foot of Niddry"s Wynd, which were maintained by n.o.blemen and gentlemen, the bold champion had often considerable difficulty in _saving himself_ from the floor, in his efforts to regain his seat! Miss Burnet of Monboddo, celebrated by Burns, and Miss Betty Home, he describes as the reigning beauties of the time deeply involved in thus causing the fall of man. Boswell was not behind, and he ascribes his aberrations to the "drinking habit which still prevails in Scotland,"
renewing good intentions, only to be broken in the same letter that reveals the Moffat lady again, "like a girl of eighteen, with the finest black hair," whom he loves so much that he is in a fever. "_This_," he adds truly enough, "_is unworthy of Paoli"s friend_."
The May of 1769 saw him in Ireland, where his relations in County Down secured his entry into the best society. A dispatch to the _Public Advertizer_, of July 7th, informed the public that "James Boswell, Esq., dined with His Grace the Duke of Leinster at his seat at Carton. He went by special invitation to meet the Lord Lieutenant; came next morning with his Excellency to the Phoenix Park, where he was present at a review of Sir Joseph Yorke"s dragoons; he dined with the Lord Mayor, and is now set out on his return to Scotland." The _belle Irlandaise_ had forgotten him, but it is to this occasion that we may refer some verses that were published by his son Sir Alexander. Chambers thinks they refer to his cousin, but the general belief tends in the direction of the notorious Margaret Caroline Rudd, the a.s.sociate in later years of the brothers Perreau, who were executed for forgery. In the _Life of Johnson_ we find Boswell, in 1776, expressing to his companion a desire to be introduced to this person, so celebrated for her address and insinuation, and later on he is shewn, on his own confession, to have visited her, "induced by the fame of her talents and irresistible power of fascination," and to have sent an account of this interview to his wife, but to have offered its perusal first, "as it appeared to me highly entertaining," to Temple, who was indignant over it. It would appear, then, that Boswell did not reveal to Johnson his former flirtation with this notorious woman, but we think that the obvious marks of the brogue in the verses shew conclusively that either the feeling was imitative and based on an earlier Irish song, or that the verses were judged by Boswell"s son, not too devoted, as we shall find, to his father"s memory, to be free from offence.
"O Larghan Clanbra.s.sil, how sweet is thy sound, To my tender remembrance as Love"s sacred ground; For there Marg"ret Caroline first charm"d my sight, And fill"d my young heart with a flutt"ring delight.
When I thought her my own, ah! too short seemed the _day_ For a jaunt to Downpatrick, or a trip on the _sea_; To express what I felt, then all language was vain, "Twas in truth what the poets have studied to feign.
But, too late, I found even she could _deceive_, And nothing was left but to sigh, weep, and _rave_; Distracted, I flew from my dear native sh.o.r.e, Resolved to see Larghan Clanbra.s.sil no more.
Yet still in some moments enchanted I find A ray of her fondness beams soft on my mind; While thus in bless"d fancy my angel I see, All the world is a Larghan Clanbra.s.sil to me."
On this journey with Boswell there was a Margaret--his own cousin, and it is curious to find him in this mood of sentimental philandering, were it no worse, when we have now to see Bozzy at the end of his love affairs. When his great work was completed in 1791, its author contributed to the _European Magazine_ for May and June a little sketch of himself, in order to give a fillip to its circulation. There he describes jauntily his Irish tour, and after what we know of his erratic course, it is delightful to come across this sage chronicler of his dead wife, circulating testimonials to her excellences, to which no doubt he was oblivious in her lifetime. "They had," he writes, "from their earliest years lived in the most intimate and unreserved friendship."
His love of the fair s.e.x has been already mentioned (he had quoted the song of "the Soapers" in our first chapter), and she was the constant yet prudent and delicate _confidante_ of all his "_egarements du coeur et de l"esprit_." This we may doubt, and the gracefully allusive French quotation reminds us of Mr Pepys" use of that language when his wife was in his mind. This jaunt was the occasion of Mr Boswell"s resolving at last to engage himself in that connection to which he had always declared himself averse. In short, he determined to become a married man. He requested her, with her excellent judgment and more sedate manners, to do him the favour of accepting him with all his faults, and though he a.s.sures his readers he had uniformly protested that a large fortune had been with him a requisite in the fair, he was yet "willing to waive that in consideration of her peculiar merit!"
Hearts are caught in the rebound, and Bozzy had solaced his loss of the _belle Irlandaise_ with the sympathy of his fellow-traveller. Having let his fancies roam so far abroad as Siena and Holland, the lover had now returned like the bird at evening to the nest from which it flew. She had no fortune, and "the penniless la.s.s wi" the lang pedigree," related as she was to the Eglintoun branch and other high families, had not in the eyes of his father the landed qualifications of Miss Blair, whose property lay so convenient for the extension of the Boswell acres. This may have been the cause of the paternal anger and the separate marriages on the same day. The wives of literary men have ever been a fruitful source of disquisition to the admirers of their heroes, and Terentia, Gemma Donati, and Anne Hathaway, have divided the biographers of Cicero, Dante, and Shakespeare. To us it seems that, like his father, she had much to bear, hampered by their domestic difficulties through her husband"s constant dependence on that father for his income, and eyed with undeserved suspicion by the judge and his second wife as a Mordecai in the gate, penniless and yet supposed to be the cause of Boswell"s pecuniary embarra.s.sments and indiscretions. The marriage was deferred till after the Stratford Jubilee, and the newly married pair took up their house in Chessel"s Buildings in the Canongate. For a year and a half after his marriage his correspondence with Johnson underwent an entire cessation, and in the August of 1771 General Paoli made a tour in Scotland, which, for a time, called forth the best organizing abilities of his friend. From the _London Magazine_ of the day, in an account contributed by our hero, we learn how Paoli had paid "a visit to James Boswell, Esq., who was the first gentleman of this country who visited Corsica, and whose writings have made the brave islanders and their general properly known over Europe." Boswell waited on the exile and the Polish Amba.s.sador at Ramsay"s Inn, at the foot of St Mary"s Wynd, visiting with them Linlithgow and Carron, "where the general had a prodigious pleasure in viewing the forge where were formed the cannon and war-like stores" sent to Corsica by his Scottish admirers. At Glasgow they were entertained by the professors, and saw "the elegant printing of the Scottish Stephani, the Messrs Foulis," and no doubt their guide managed to remind their excellencies of a certain _Tour in Corsica_ emanating thence. Auchinleck was visited to "the joy of my worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican Hero in our romantick groves," as he tells Garrick, and on their return to Glasgow the freedom of the city was conferred on Paoli by Lord Provost Dunlop.[A] At Edinburgh "the general slept under the roof of his ever grateful friend." The whole forms a favourable specimen of Boswell"s organizing capacities, and viewed in relation to the friendly intercourse he is found maintaining with prominent and influential persons, our regret is but increased that in the interests of his wife and children his abilities were not exercised in a more strictly professional channel.
London he visited in the March of 1772 over an appeal to the Lords from the Court of Session. Johnson was now in good health, and was eager "to see Beattie"s College." In the _Scots Magazine_ for February 1773 there is mentioned a masked ball, attended by seventy persons of quality, given in Edinburgh by Sir Alexander Macdonald and his wife, Miss Bosville of Yorkshire, one of Boswell"s loves. Croker says that the masquerade for which he was rallied by Johnson was given by the Dowager Countess of Fife, and that Bozzy went as a dumb conjurer; but from the expression of the _Magazine_, "an entertainment little known in this part of the Kingdom," coupled with the words employed by Johnson, there can be no doubt that Croker is wrong, and that the host on this occasion was the churlish chief, whose inhospitable ways they were to experience in Skye. He was now near the great honour of his life, admission to that Literary Club, of which, said Sir William Jones, "I will only say that there is no branch of human knowledge on which some of our members are not capable of giving information." Never was honour better deserved or better repaid. Without his record the fame of that club would have pa.s.sed away, surviving at best in some sort of hazy companionship with the Kit-Cat, b.u.t.ton"s, Will"s, and other clubs and a.s.semblies. Never was there a club of which each member was better qualified to take care of his own fame with posterity. None of Johnson"s a.s.sociates would have hesitated in declaring an extended date of renown for the _Rambler_; and perhaps he himself would have staked the reputation a.s.sured, as Cowper said, by the tears of bards and heroes in order to immortalize the dead, on his _Ra.s.selas_ or the _Dictionary_. Yet he and most members of that club, apart from the record of Boswell, would be but names to the literary antiquary, and be by the ma.s.s of readers entirely forgotten.
He had canva.s.sed the members. Johnson wrote, on April 23rd, to Goldsmith, who was in the chair that evening, to consider Boswell as proposed by himself in his absence. On the night of the ballot, April 30th, Boswell dined at Beauclerk"s, where, after the company had gone to the club, he was left till the fate of his election should be announced.
After Johnson had taken the thing in hand there was not much danger, yet poor Bozzy "sat in a state of anxiety which even the charming conversation of Lady Di Beauclerk could not entirely dissipate." There he received the tidings of his election, and he hastened to the place of meeting. Burke he met that night for the first time, and on his entrance, Johnson, "with humorous formality, gave me a _charge_, pointing out the conduct expected from me as a good member of the club."
That charge we can believe Forster to be right in suspecting to be a caution against publishing abroad the proceedings and the talk of the members.
In the autumn of the year, as they drew near to Monboddo, Johnson, we should think with excessive rudeness, told him "several of the members wished to keep you out. Burke told me, he doubted if you were fit for it: but, now you are in, none of them are sorry. Burke says, that you have so much good humour naturally, it is scarce a virtue." The faithful Bozzy replied, "They were afraid of you, sir, as it was you who proposed me;" and the doctor was p.r.o.ne to admit that if the one blackball necessary to exclude had been given, they knew they never would have got in another member. Yet even from this rebuff he managed to deftly extract a compliment. Beauclerk, the doctor said, had been very earnest for the admission, and Beauclerk, replied Boswell, "has a keenness of mind which is very uncommon." The witty Topham, along with Reynolds, Garrick, and others, is immortalized in the pages of the man who was not thought by the wits of Gerrard Street fit for their club.
[A] By the Town Clerk Depute of Glasgow, R. Renwick, Esq., we are informed that no notice of this enrolment of General Paoli was entered at the time, pursuant to the custom of the Register over honorary burgesships.
CHAPTER V
TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES. 1773
"Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides."--WORDSWORTH.
When Boswell was leaving London in May he called, for the last time, upon Goldsmith, round whom the clouds of misfortune were fast settling, and who was planning a _Dictionary of Arts and Sciences_ as a means of extrication from his embarra.s.sments. In such circ.u.mstances, it was not unnatural for Goldsmith to revert to his own past travels, and to the reflection that he was unlikely again to set out upon them, unless sheltered like Johnson behind a pension. He a.s.sured Boswell that he would never be able to lug the dead weight of the Rambler through the Highlands. The enthusiastic pioneer, however, was loud in the praises of his companion; Goldsmith thought him not equal to Burke, "who winds into a subject like a serpent." The other, with more than wonted irrelevance, maintained that Johnson was "the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle;" and with these characteristic utterances they parted, never again to meet. Throughout his great work, Boswell shews ever a curious depreciation of Goldsmith. Rivalry for the good graces of their common friend Johnson, as Scott thought, and the fear of his older acquaintance as the possible biographer made him suspicious of the merits of the poet, who figures in the pages of Boswell as a foil for his gently patronizing tone,--"honest Goldsmith."
The tour to the Hebrides had been a project which had occurred to them in the first days of their friendship. The _Description of the Western Isles of Scotland_ (1703) by Martin, had been put into Johnson"s hands at a very early age by his father; and, though for long he had disappointed the expectations of his friend, he had talked of it in the spring of this year in such a way as to lead Boswell to write to Beattie, Robertson, Lord Elibank, and the chiefs of the Macdonalds and the Macleods, for invitations such as he could shew the doctor. Mrs Thrale also and others were induced to forward the scheme, and at last the Rambler set out on the 6th day of August. He was nine days upon the road, including two at Newcastle, where he picked up his friend Scott (Lord Stowell), and after pa.s.sing Berwick, Dunbar and Prestonpans, the coach late in the evening deposited Johnson at Boyd"s inn, _The White Horse_, in the Canongate,--the rendezvous of the old Hanoverian faction,--which occupied the site of the present building from which this volume, one hundred and twenty-three years later, is published. On the Sat.u.r.day evening of his arrival a note was dispatched by him to Boswell, who flew to him, and "exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia."
Arm in arm they walked up the High Street to Boswell"s house in James"s Court, to which he had removed from the Canongate. The first impression of the Scottish capital was not pleasing, for at ten the beat of the city drums was heard; and, amid cries of _gardy loo_, what Oldham euphemistically calls "the perils of the night," were thrown over the windows down on the pavement, in the absence of covered sewers. When Captain Burt before this time had been in Edinburgh, a "caddie" had preceded him on a scouting expedition with cries of "haud your han","
and among flank and rear discharges he had pa.s.sed to his quarters. A zealous Scotsman, as Boswell says, could have wished the doctor to be less gifted with the sense of smell, however much the sense of the breadth of the street and the height of the buildings impressed him. His wife had tea waiting, and they sat till two in the morning. To shew respect for the sage, Mrs Boswell had given up her own room, which her husband "cannot but gratefully mention, as one of a thousand obligations which I owe her, since the great obligation of her being pleased to accept of me as her husband."
Next morning, on the Sunday, Mr Scott and Sir Wm. Forbes of Pitsligo breakfasted with them, and the host"s heart was delighted by the "little infantine noise" which his child Veronica made, with the appearance of listening to the great man. The fond father with a cheerful recklessness, not realized we fear, declared she should have for this five hundred pounds of additional fortune.
The best society in the capital was invited to meet Johnson at breakfast and dinner--Robertson, Hailes, Gregory, Blacklock, and others. James"s Court was rather a distinguished part of the city, and an improvement upon the former quarters in Chessel"s Buildings. The inhabitants, says Robert Chambers, took themselves so seriously as to keep a clerk to record their proceedings, together with a scavenger of their own, and held among themselves their social meetings and b.a.l.l.s. Hume had occupied part of the house before Johnson"s visit, though three years had pa.s.sed since he had moved to the new town into St David Street. Writing from his old house to Adam Smith, he is glad to "have come within sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkcaldy from my windows;" the study of the historian, to which he turned fondly from the Parisian _salons_, is represented in _Guy Mannering_ as the library of Pleydell with its fine view from the windows, "which commanded that incomparable prospect of the ground between Edinburgh and the sea, the Firth of Forth with its islands, and the varied sh.o.r.e of Fife to the northward." Bozzy may have been reticent about the former tenant; he was "not clear that it was right in me to keep company with him," though he thought the man greater or better than his books. No word then was sent to him, nor to Adam Smith across the Forth to Kirkcaldy. They visited the Parliament House, where Harry Erskine was presented to Johnson, and, having made his bow, slipped a shilling into Boswell"s hand, "for the sight of his bear."
Holyrood and the University were inspected, and as they pa.s.sed up the College-Wynd, where Goldsmith in his medical student days in Edinburgh had lived, Scott, as a child of two years, may have seen the party. On the 18th they set out from the capital, with the Parthian shot from Lord Auchinleck to a friend--"there"s nae hope for Jamie, man; Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, man? 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, man? A dominie, an auld dominie; he keepit a schule and ca"ad it an acaadamy!" No more bitter taunt could have been levelled against Johnson, with his memories of Edial, near Lichfield; readers who may remember the munificent manner in which the heritors of their day had provided for Ruddiman, Michael Bruce, and others, will see the contempt that the old judge had felt for the past of the Rambler. Johnson had left behind him in a drawer a volume of his diary; and, as this would have been excellent copy for his projected _Life_, we feel the temptation to which Boswell was exposed. "I wish," he says navely, "that female curiosity had been strong enough to have had it all transcribed; which might easily have been done; and I think the theft, being _pro bono publico_, might have been forgiven. But I may be wrong. My wife told me she never once had looked into it. She did not seem quite easy when we left her; but away we went!"
The character-sketch of Johnson, given at the opening of the book is full of fine shading and touches; but the traveller who now follows them on the journey will hardly, in comparison with his own tourist attire, recognise what in 1773 was thought fit and convenient costume.
"He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair b.u.t.tons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon this tour, when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth greatcoat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio _Dictionary_; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles."
A companion vignette of himself is added by Boswell.
"A gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant pa.s.sion. 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 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 anyone had supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. 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."
The doctor who was thrifty over this tour had not thought it necessary to bring his own black servant; but Boswell"s man, Joseph Ritter, a Bohemian, a fine stately fellow over six feet, who had been over much of Europe, was invaluable to them in their journey. For this the valiant Rambler had provided a pair of pistols, powder, and a quant.i.ty of bullets, but the a.s.surance of their needlessness had induced him to leave them behind with the precious diary in the keeping of Mrs Boswell.
Such a tour was then a feat for a man of sixty-four, in a country which, to the Englishman of his day, was as unknown as St Kilda is now to the ma.s.s of Scotchmen. The London citizen who, says Lockhart, "makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben Nevis," can with difficulty imagine a journey in the Hebrides with rainy weather, in open boats, or upon horseback over wild moorland and mora.s.ses, a journey that even to Voltaire sounded like a tour to the North Pole. Smollett, in _Humphrey Clinker_, says the people at the other end of the island knew as little of Scotland as they did of j.a.pan, nor was Charing Cross, witness as it did the greatest height of "the tide of human existence,"
then bright with the autumnal trips of circular tours and Macbrayne steamers. The feeling for scenery, besides, was in its infancy, nor was it scenery but men and manners that were sought by our two travellers, to whom what would now be styled the Wordsworthian feeling had little or no interest. Gibbon has none of it, and Johnston laughed at Shenstone for not caring whether his woods and streams had anything good to eat in them, "as if one could fill one"s belly with hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades." Fleet Street to him was more delicious than Tempe, and the bare scent of the pastoral draws an angry snort from the critic. Boswell, in turn, confesses to no relish for nature; he admits he has no pencil for visible objects, but only for varieties of mind and _esprit_. The _Critical Review_ congratulated the public on a fortunate event in the annals of literature for the following account in Johnson"s _Journey_--"I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had, indeed, no trees to whisper over my head but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high hills, which, if hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself." This, little more than the reflections of a c.o.c.kney on a hayrick, is as far as the eighteenth century could go, nor need we wonder that the Rambler"s moralizing at Iona struck so much Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, that he "clasped his hands together, and remained for some time in an att.i.tude of silent admiration." Burns himself, as Prof. Veitch has rightly indicated, has little of the later feeling and regards barren nature with the unfavourable eyes of the farmer and the practical agriculturist, nor has the travelled Goldsmith more to shew. Writing from Edinburgh, he laments that "no grove or brook lend their music to cheer the stranger," while at Leyden, "wherever I turned my eye, fine houses, elegant gardens, statues, grottoes, presented themselves." Even Gray found that Mount Cenis carried the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far, and Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley would have resented the Johnsonian description of a Highland Ben as "a considerable protuberance." Indeed, Goldsmith"s bare mention of that object, so dear to Pope and his century,--"grottoes"--reminds us we are not yet in the modern world. Yet the boldness of the sage, and the cheerfulness of Boswell, carried them through it all. "I should," wrote the doctor to Mrs Thrale, "have been very sorry to have missed any of the inconveniences, to have had more light or less rain, for their co-operation crowded the scene and filled the mind."
Crossing the Firth, after landing on Inchkeith, they arrived at St Andrews which had long been an object of interest to Johnson. They pa.s.sed Leuchars, Dundee, and Aberbrothick. The ruins of ecclesiastical magnificence would seem to have touched a hidden chord in Boswell"s past, for we find him on the road talking of the "Roman Catholick faith," and leading his companion on transubstantiation; but this, being "an awful subject, I did not then press Dr Johnson upon it." Montrose was reached, and at the inn the waiter was called "rascal" by the Rambler for putting sugar into the lemonade with his fingers, to the delight of Bozzy who rallied him into quietness by the a.s.surance that the landlord was an Englishman. Monboddo was then pa.s.sed, where "the magnetism of his conversation drew us out of our way," though the prompt action of Boswell as agent in advance really was the source of their invitation. Burnet was one of the best scholars in Scotland, and "Johnson and my lord spoke highly of Homer." All his paradoxes about the superiority of the ancients, the existence of men with tails, slavery and other inst.i.tutions were vented, but all went well. The decrease of learning in England, which Johnson lamented, was met by Monboddo"s belief in its extinction in Scotland, but Bozzy, as the old High School of Edinburgh boy, put in a word for that place of education and brought him to confess that it did well.
The New Inn at Aberdeen was full. But the waiter knew Boswell by his likeness to his father who put up here on circuit--the only portrait, we believe, there is of Lord Auchinleck--and accommodation was provided.
They visited King"s College, where Boswell "stepped into the chapel and looked at the tomb of its founder, Bishop Elphinstone, of whom I shall have occasion to write in my history of James IV., the patron of my family." The freedom of the city was conferred on Johnson. Was this an honour, or an excuse for a social gla.s.s among the civic Solons of an unreformed corporation? The latter may be the case, when we reflect that none of the four universities thought of giving him an honorary degree, though Beattie at this time had received the doctorate in laws from Oxford, and Gray some years before this had declined the offer from Aberdeen. Nor can we forget the taunt of George Colman the younger about Pangloss in his _Heir at Law_, and his own recollection how, when a lad at King"s College, he had been "scarcely a week in Old Aberdeen when the Lord Provost of the New Town invited me to drink wine with him, one evening in the Town Hall;" and presented him on October 8th, 1781, with the freedom of the city. No negative inference can be established from the contemporary notices in the _Aberdeen Journal_ over the visit. Every paragraph is contemptuous in its tone; and till October 4th no notice is taken of the honour, when "a correspondent says he is glad to find that the city of Aberdeen has presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed for a pension." The definition of _oats_ in the Dictionary is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour and his system of spelling. But the doctor easily maintained his conversational supremacy over his academic hosts, who "started not a single mawkin for us to pursue."
Ellon, Slains Castle, and Elgin were visited. They pa.s.sed Gordon Castle at Fochabers, drove over the heath where Macbeth met the witches, "cla.s.sic ground to an Englishman," as the old editor of Shakespeare felt, and reached Nairn, where now they heard for the first time the Gaelic tongue,--"one of the songs of Ossian," quoth the justly incredulous doctor,--and saw peat fires. At Fort George they were welcomed by Sir Eyre Coote. The old military aspirations of Bozzy flared up and were soothed: "for a little while I fancied myself a military man, and it pleased me." As they left, the commander reminded them of the hardships by the way, in return as Boswell interposed for the rough things Johnson had said of Scotland. "You must change your name, sir,"
said Sir Eyre. "Ay, to Dr M"Gregor," replied Bozzy. The notion of the lexicographer"s a.s.suming the forbidden name of the bold outlaw, with "his foot upon his native heath," is rather comic, though later on we find him striding about with a target and broad sword, and a bonnet drawn over his wig! Though both professed profuse addiction to Jacobite sentiments, it is curious no mention is made of Culloden. It may be that Boswell, who some days later weeps over the battle, may have diplomatically avoided it, or it may have been dark as their chaise pa.s.sed it, though it is not impossible that Boswell, who at St Andrews had not known where to look for John Knox"s grave, and has no mention of Airsmoss where Cameron fell in his own parish of Auchinleck, was ignorant of the site. From their inn at Inverness he wrote to Garrick gleefully over his tour with Davy"s old preceptor, and then begged permission to leave Johnson for a time, "that I might run about and pay some visits to several good people," finding much satisfaction in hearing every one speak well of his father.
On Monday, August 30, they began their _equitation_; "I would needs make a word too." They took horses now, a third carried his man Ritter, and a fourth their portmanteaus. The scene by Loch Ness was new to the sage, and he rises in his narrative a little to it and the "limpid waters beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation."
Through Glenshiel, Glenmorison, Auchnasheal, they pa.s.sed on to the inn at Glenelg. They made beds for themselves with fresh hay, and, like Wolfe at Quebec, they had their "choice of difficulties;" but the philosophic Rambler maintained they might have been worse on the hillside, and b.u.t.toning himself up in his greatcoat he lay down, while Boswell had his sheets spread on the hay, and his clothes and greatcoat laid over him by way of blankets.