It was in good company that Johnson, on the morning of Monday, August 16, “walked out to see some of the things which they had to show in Edinburgh,” for he was under the guidance of the historian of Scotland. “I love Robertson,” Johnson had said a few years earlier, “and I won’t talk of his book.” If Boswell had reported any part of this saying we may hope that it was only the first half, for he who neglects the author makes but a poor recompense by loving the man. At all events, Robertson was not troubled with diffidence, for at Holyrood “he fluently harangued” his companion on the scenes described in his History. No doubt he told many of those anecdotes for which Johnson that morning had declared his love as they breakfasted together, and took care not to attempt “to weave them into a system.” THE LAWNMARKET. As they passed into the Lawnmarket they had not before them that wide expanse which in the present day makes so noble an end to the High Street. The view was obstructed by the Weigh House, the Luckenbooths, the Tolbooth, and the Guard House.[411] At the Weigh House the boast, perhaps, was made that so great was the trade of the town that the public weighing-machine which was there kept brought in no less than a sum of £500 every year. At the Tolbooth and the Guard House, that “long low ugly building,” which looked like “a black snail crawling up the High Street,”[412] something, perhaps, was said of the Porteous riots. But the real story of the Heart of Mid-Lothian could only have been told them by that little child of scarce two years in the College Wynd, how the wild mob on that September night, seven-and-thirty years before, burnt down the massive gate of the jail, and dragged their wretched prisoner by torchlight to the gallows, and how Jeanie Deans could not tell a lie even to save her sister from a shameful death. There was no one but this bright-eyed boy who could have even pointed out in the Luckenbooths the stall where poor Peter Peebles and Paul Plainstanes had for years carried on “that great line of business as mercers and linendrapers,” which in the end led to a lawsuit that is famous all the world over. PARLIAMENT HOUSE.Having no one to tell them of all this they passed on through Parliament Close, “which new-fangled affectation has termed a square,”[413] to the Parliament House, which still showed “the grave grey hue that had been breathed over it by one hundred and fifty years,” and which was still free from the disgrace of “bright freestone and contemptible decorations.” The “sorrow and indignation,” which the restorer’s wanton changes aroused troubled a later generation.[414] Here it was that the Court of Session sat, the High Court of Justice of Scotland. It was in these August days empty of lawyers, for the Vacation had just begun; but Johnson on his return saw it also in term time, and thought “the pleading too vehement and too much addressed to the passions of the judges. It was not the Areopagus,” he said. Here Henry Erskine, the brother of the famous Chancellor, slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hands, who had introduced him to Johnson, saying that it was for the sight of his bear, and here Lord Auchinleck, seeing the great man enter, whispered to one of his brethren on the Bench that it was Ursa Major. In the Outer Hall had once sat the ancient Parliament of Scotland. Here it was that Lord Belhaven, at perhaps its last meeting, made that pathetic speech which drew tears from the audience. Here every day during term time there was a very Babel of a Court of Justice. Like Westminster Hall of old it was the tribunal of many judges, as well as the gathering ground of advocates, solicitors, suitors, witnesses, and idlers in general. Here it was that “the Macer shouted with all his well-remembered brazen strength of lungs: “Poor Peter Peebles versus Plainstanes, per Dumtoustie et Tough:—Maister Da-a-niel Dumtoustie.”” Here it was that a famous but portly wag of later days, “Peter” Robinson, seeing Scott with his tall conical white head passing through, called out to the briefless crowd about the fire-place, “Hush, boys, here comes old Peveril—I see the Peak.” Scott looked round and replied, “Ay, ay, my man, as weel Peveril o’ the Peak ony day as Peter o’ the Painch” (paunch).[415] Here Thomas Carlyle, a student of the University, not yet fourteen years old, on the afternoon of the November day on which he first saw Edinburgh, “was dragged in to a scene” which he never forgot:

Here every year, on the evening of the King’s birthday, there was a scene of loyal riot. At the cost of the city funds, some fifteen hundred guests, on the invitation of the magistrates, “roaring, drinking, toasting, and quarrelling,” drank the royal healths to a late hour of the night. “The wreck and the fumes of that hot and scandalous night” tainted the air of the Court for a whole week.[417] From the Hall our travellers passed into the Inner House, where the fifteen judges sat together as “a Court of Review.” Like Carlyle, Johnson saw “great Law Lords this and that, great advocates, alors cÉlÈbres, as Thiers has it.” There were Hailes, and Kames, and Monboddo, on the Bench, and Henry Dundas, Solicitor General. The judges wore long robes of scarlet faced with white, but though their dignity was great, their salaries were small when compared with those paid to their brethren in Westminster Hall. The President had but £1,300 a year, and each of the fourteen Lords of Session but £700. Six of them, among whom was Boswell’s father, received each £300 more as a Commissioner of Justiciary.[418] The room, or rather “den,” in which they sat, “was so cased in venerable dirt that it was impossible to say whether it had ever been painted. Dismal though the hole was, the old fellows who had been bred there never looked so well anywhere else.”[419]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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