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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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