George Birkbeck Norman Hill

A

traveller who passed through the Hebrides in the year 1786 recorded that in many houses he was given the room to sleep in which had been occupied by Dr. Johnson.[1] Twenty-eight years later, when Sir Walter Scott with some of his friends landed in Skye, it was found on inquiry that the first thought which had come into each man’s mind was of Johnson’s Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale.[2] The Highlanders at Dunvegan, Scott goes on to say, saw that about Johnson there was something worthy of respect, “they could not tell what, and long spoke of him as the Sassenach mohr, or big Englishman.”[3] He still lives among them, mainly, no doubt, by his own and Boswell’s books, but partly also by tradition. Very few of the houses remain where he visited. Nevertheless, in two of these in the Hebrides, and in one in the Lowlands, I was shown his bedroom. Proud, indeed, would the old man have been could he have foreseen that an Englishman who followed on his steps one hundred and sixteen years later would be shown at New Hailes, at Rasay, and at Dunvegan, “Dr. Johnson’s Chamber.” At Rasay is preserved his walking-stick—not the famous “piece of timber” which was destined for some museum, but was stolen or lost in Mull, but one which he had occasionally used. In his bedroom an engraving of him hangs on the wall. The china tea-set out of which he had drunk is preserved by a descendant of the laird who was his host. At Dunvegan his portrait is set up in a post of honour in the noble drawing-room of the famous old castle, and his autograph letter to Macleod of Macleod rests among the ancient memorials of that still more ancient family. That it is endorsed “Dr. Johnston’s Letter” may be twisted into a compliment. So popular was he that his very name was “Scottified.”

DR. JOHNSON’S BEDROOM, DUNVEGAN.

TRADITIONS OF JOHNSON.

In many places I found traditions of him still remaining—some, no doubt, true; others false. But whether false or true, by their vitality they show the deep mark which the man made as he passed along. In Glenmorison there are countryfolk who profess to know by the report of their forefathers the “clear rivulet” in “the narrow valley, not very flowery but sufficiently verdant,” where Johnson reposed on “a bank such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign, and first conceived the thought of the narration” of his tour.[4] In a farmhouse on Loch Duich, just below the mountain which exhausted his patience and good-humour, and nearly exhausted his strength, I was told of the speech which he made as he reached the top of the pass. “He turned as he was beginning the descent, and said to the mountain, ‘Good-bye, Ma’am Rattachan, I hope never to see your face again.’”[5] From Rasay a friendly correspondent wrote to tell me how the great man had climbed up Dun Can, the highest mountain in the island, and had danced on the top. I have pointed out that it was Boswell and not Johnson who performed this feat, but the tradition, doubtless, will linger on. At Dunvegan Miss Macleod of Macleod, who remembers her grandmother, Johnson’s hostess, and her aunts, “the four daughters, who knew all the arts of southern elegance, and all the modes of English economy,”[6] has preserved some traditions more worthy of trust. “One day,” she said, “he had scolded the maid for not getting good peats, and had gone out in the rain to the stack to fetch in some himself.[7] He caught a bad cold. Lady Macleod went up to his room to see how he was, and found him in bed, with his wig turned inside out, and the wrong end foremost, serving the purpose of ‘a cap by night,’ like the stocking of Goldsmith’s Author. On her return to the drawing-room, she said, ‘I have often seen very plain people, but anything as ugly as Dr. Johnson, with his wig thus stuck on, I never have seen.’[8] She was (her granddaughter added) greatly pleased with his talk, for she had seen enough of the world to enjoy it; but her daughters, who were still quite girls, disliked him much, and called him a bear.”

MAM RATTACHAN.

At the inn at Broadford, sitting in the entrance-hall, I fell into talk with an elderly man, a retired exciseman, who lived close by. He, too, had his traditions of the Sassenach mohr. His father had known an old lady, blind of one eye, who was fond of telling how in her childhood, at the time of Johnson’s visit, she had been watching the dancing in that famous farmhouse of Corrichatachin, where Boswell got so drunk one night over the punch, and so penitent the next morning over a severe headache and the Epistle for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity.[9] A large brass button on the coat-tail of one of the dancers had struck her in her eye as he whirled round and had so injured it that she lost the sight. My informant had a story also to tell of the learned minister, the Rev. Donald Macqueen, who accompanied Johnson in part of his tour. “A crofter seeing the two men pass, asked the minister who was his companion. Macqueen replied, ‘The man who made the English language.’ ‘Then he had very little to do,’ rejoined the crofter; meaning, according to the Gaelic idiom, that he might have been much better employed.” My friendly exciseman had known also an old lady who remembered Johnson coming to her father’s house in Mull. According to a custom once very common in the Highlands, though even in those days passing fast away, she had been sent for three or four years to a shepherd’s hut to be fostered. It was shortly after her return home that Johnson’s visit was paid. He did not hide his displeasure at the roughness which still clung to her. She had not forgotten, moreover, how he found fault with the large candles, rudely made of pieces of old cloth twisted round and dipped in tallow.[10] My acquaintance ended his talk by saying: “If Dr. Johnson had returned to Scotland after publishing his book, he would have got a crack on his skull.”

At Craignure, in the Isle of Mull, the landlord of the little inn had his story to tell of the untimely death of young Maclean of Col, that “amiable man,” who, while the pages of Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands “were preparing to attest his virtues, perished in the passage between Ulva and Inch-Kenneth.”[11] My host’s great-grandmother, a Macquarrie of Ulva, on the night when the boat was upset, had been watching the cattle near the fatal shore. An old woman who was to have been her companion had failed her, so that she was alone. She saw nothing, and heard no cries. “A half-witted person,” my informant added, in a serious voice, “had warned one of the party not to go; but his warning was not heeded, and the man lost his life.”

SOUND OF ULVA.

At Lochbuie two traditions, I found, had been preserved in the family of the laird, the great-grandson of that Maclean of Lochbuie whom Boswell had heard described as “a great roaring braggadocio,” but found only “a bluff, comely, noisy old gentleman. He bawled out to Johnson (as Boswell tells us), ‘Are you of the Johnstons of Glencroe or of Ardnamurchan?’ Dr. Johnson gave him a significant look, but made no answer.”[12] The report has come down in the family that Johnson replied that he was neither one nor the other. Whereupon Lochbuie cried out, “Damn it, Sir, then you must be a bastard.” There can, I fear, be no doubt that this rejoinder belongs to those excellens impromptus À loisir in which Rousseau excelled[13]—that esprit de l’escalier, as the French describe it. If the laird, like Addison, could draw for a thousand pounds, he had, I suspect, but nine pence in ready money.[14] For had this repartee been made at the time, and not been merely an after-invention, Boswell most certainly would not have let it pass unrecorded. The second tradition is scarcely more trustworthy. Johnson at the tea-table, I was told, helped himself to sugar with his fingers, whereupon Lady Lochbuie at once had the basin emptied, and fresh sugar brought in. He said nothing at the time, but when he had finished his tea he flung down the cup, exclaiming that if he had polluted one he had also polluted the other. A lady of the family of Lochbuie, whose memory goes back ninety years, in recounting this story when I was in Scotland, added, “But I do not know whether it was true.” That it was not true I have little doubt. In the first place, we have again Boswell’s silence; in the second place, to the minor decencies of life Johnson was by no means inattentive. At Paris he was on the point of refusing a cup of coffee because the footman had put in the sugar with his fingers; and at Edinburgh, in a passion, he threw a glass of lemonade out of the window because it had been sweetened in the same manner by the waiter. In one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale he expressed his displeasure in Skye at the very practice with which he is charged a few weeks later in Mull. Describing his visit to the house of Sir Alexander Macdonald, he wrote: “The lady had not the common decencies of her tea-table: we picked up our sugar with our fingers.”[15]

It is strange that while in Mull, that “most dolorous country,” that “gloom of desolation,” as Johnson described it, these stories of him are preserved, the boatman who took me across the narrow passage between it and Inch-Kenneth had no traditionary knowledge of his host, Sir Allan Maclean, and of his retirement in that little island. To the forefathers of the men of Mull the head of the Macleans would have been an object of reverence and even of fear, and Johnson only a passing wonder. “I would cut my bones for him,” said one of his clan, speaking of Sir Allan in Boswell’s hearing.[16] But of the Highland chief who lived among them no remembrance remains, while the Sassenach mohr, who spent but a few days in the island-home of the Macleans, is still almost “a household word.”

SCOTTISH SENSITIVENESS.

I was indeed surprised to find through the Highlands and the Hebrides how much he still remained in men’s thoughts. On Loch Lomond, the boatman who rowed me to the islands on which he had landed, a man of reading and intelligence, said that though he had himself read Johnson’s Journey, yet “Scotchmen still feel too sore to like reading him.” Whatever soreness still lingers is, I have little doubt, much more due to his sarcasms recorded by Boswell than to any passages in his own narrative. But it is surprising that Scotchmen cannot more generally join in a hearty laugh at his humorous sallies, though they are at their own expense. That the Scotch of a hundred years and more ago were over-sensitive is not astonishing. At that time in most respects they were still far behind England. It was England that they were striving to follow in their arts, their commerce, and their agriculture. It was the English accent that they were striving to catch, and the English style in which they laboured to write. It was to the judgment of Englishmen that their authors, no small or inglorious band, anxiously appealed. That they should be sensitive to criticism beyond even the Americans of our day was not unnatural. For in the poverty of their soil, and the rudiments of their manufactures and trade, they found none of that boastful comfort which supports the citizen of the United States, even when he is most solicitous of English approbation. But at the present day, when they are in most respects abreast of Englishmen, and in some even ahead, they should disprove the charge that is brought against them of wanting humour by showing that they can enjoy a hearty laugh, even though it goes against them. Johnson’s ill-humour did not go deep, and, no doubt, was often laughed away. Of that rancour which disgraced Hume his nature was wholly incapable. He wished no ill to Scotland as Hume wished ill to England.[17] “He returned from it,” writes Boswell, “in great good-humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated.”[18]

Not all Scotch critics were hostile towards him. The Scots Magazine, which last century was to Edinburgh what the Gentleman’s Magazine was to London, always spoke of him with great respect. Writing of him early in the year in which he visited Scotland, it says:

“Dr. Johnson has long possessed a splendid reputation in the republic of letters, and it was honestly acquired. He is said to affect a singularity in his manners and to contemn the social rules which are established in the intercourse of civil life. If this extravagance is affected, it is a fault; if it has been acquired by the habitudes of his temper and his indolence, it scarcely merits censure. We allow to the man who can soar so high above the multitude to descend sometimes beneath them.”[19]

In the two reviews of his Journey in the same magazine, there is not one word of censure; neither when Boswell, eleven years later, brought out his account of the tour, had they any fault to find. In the character which they drew of Johnson on his death they leave unnoticed his attacks on Scotland. They are even generous in their praise. Speaking of his pension they say: “It would have been a national disgrace if such talents, distinguished by such writings, had met with no other recompense than the empty consciousness of fame.”[20] There were also men of eminence in Scotland who at once acknowledged the merits of the book. “I love the benevolence of the author,” said Lord Hailes.[21] The “virtuous and candid Dempster,” the “patriotic Knox,” Tytler, the historian, “a Scot, if ever a Scot there were,” had each his word of high praise.[22] Sir Walter Scott, writing many years later, said: “I am far from being of the number of those angry Scotsmen who imputed to Johnson’s national prejudices all or a great part of the report he has given of our country. I remember the Highlands ten or twelve years later, and no one can conceive of how much that could have been easily remedied travellers had to complain.”[23]

These men, nevertheless, formed a small minority. The outcry that was raised against Johnson was at once loud and bitter. To attacks for many a long year he had been used, but yet this time he was startled. “He expressed his wonder at the extreme jealousy of the Scotch, and their resentment at having their country described as it really was.”[24] Boswell mentions “the brutal reflections thrown out against him,” and “the rancour with which he was assailed by numbers of shallow irritable North Britons.”[25] How quickly the storm gathered and burst is shown in a letter written by an Englishman from Edinburgh a few days after the book was published:

“Edinburgh, Jan. 24, 1775. Dr. Johnson’s Tour has just made its appearance here, and has put the country into a flame. Everybody finds some reason to be affronted. A thousand people who know not a single creature in the Western Isles interest themselves in their cause, and are offended at the accounts that are given of them. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, all teem with abuse of the Doctor. He was received with the most flattering marks of civility by everyone. He was looked upon as a kind of miracle, and almost carried about for a show. Those who were in his company were silent the moment he spoke, lest they should interrupt him, and lose any of the good things he was going to say. He repaid all their attention to him with ill-breeding, and when in the company of the ablest men in this country, who are certainly his superiors in point of abilities, his whole design was to show them how contemptibly he thought of them. Had the Scotch been more acquainted with Dr. Johnson’s private character they would have expected nothing better. A man of illiberal manners and surly disposition, who all his life long had been at enmity with the Scotch, takes a sudden resolution of travelling amongst them; not, according to his own account, ‘to find a people of liberal and refined education, but to see wild men and wild manners.’”[26]

ATTACKS ON JOHNSON.

The “patriotic Knox,” as Boswell calls him, the author of A Tour through the Highlands and Hebride Isles in 1786, a man freer from prejudices than the common run, and one who readily acknowledged the merits of Johnson’s book, bears equal witness to the wrath of his countrymen.

“Dr. Johnson (he writes) set out under incurable impressions of a national prejudice, a religious prejudice, and a literary jealousy. From a writer of such abilities and such prejudices the natives of Scotland had reason to expect a shower of arrows without mercy, and it was possibly from this prepossession that they were ready to fall upon him as one man the moment that his book appeared. Their minds were charged with sentiments of indignity, resentment and revenge, which they did not fail to discharge upon his head in whole platoons from every quarter.”[27]

To us, who know Johnson better than we know any other author who has ever lived, the charge of literary jealousy seems ridiculous. But Knox lived before Boswell’s Life was published. Scotland, in which learning and even literature had slumbered for nearly a century, had started up from her long sleep, and was bent on turning the Auld Reekie into the Modern Athens. All her geese were swans, though of swans she had at this season a fair flock. “Edinburgh is a hotbed of genius,” wrote Smollett, shortly before Johnson’s visit, and as a proof of it he instanced among “authors of the first distinction,” Wallace, Blair, Wilkie, and Ferguson. Hume still earlier had proclaimed that at last there was “a hope of seeing good tragedies in the English language,” for Johnny Home had written his Douglas. Wilkie of the Epigoniad, the great historian held, was to be the Homer, and Blacklock the Pindar, of Scotland.[28] But it was in Ossian Macpherson that the hopes of the country had at one time soared highest. By Dr. Blair, the Edinburgh Professor of Rhetoric, he had been ranked with Homer and Virgil.[29] The national pride, the honour of Scotland, was concerned, and the meanest motive was attributed to the man who had ventured to pronounce his poems an impudent forgery. Macpherson was a dangerous enemy. Against “the menaces of a ruffian” a thick cudgel might avail; but the secret arts of a literary forger were not so easily baffled. His position was one of great power, for from the Court he received a pension at first of £600 a year, and afterwards of £800, “to supervise the newspapers. He inserted what lies he pleased, and prevented whatever he disapproved of being printed.”[30] It was from this tainted source that no doubt sprang many of “the miserable cavillings against the Journey in newspapers, magazines, and other fugitive pieces.”[31] These, as Boswell tells us, “only furnished Johnson with sport.” Nevertheless, though they did not trouble his mind, they marred the fame of his book, and prejudiced not only the immediate, but even the traditional judgment of Scotland. Enough dirt was thrown, and some of it did stick and sticks still. Lies were sent wandering through the land, and some of them have not even yet found their everlasting rest. One disgusting story, not unworthy of the inventive genius of Ossian himself, is still a solace to Scots of the baser sort. That it is a lie can be plainly proved, for it rests on a supposed constant suspicion in Johnson of the food provided for him. Now we know from his own writings that only twice in his tour had he “found any reason to complain of a Scottish table.”[32] Moreover, in his letters to Mrs. Thrale and in Boswell’s Journal, we can follow his course with great accuracy and minuteness. Had there been any foundation for this lie it must be found on the road between Inverness and the seashore. Now we know what meals he had at each station. Even in the miserable inn at Glenelg, where his accommodation was at its worst, if he had chosen he could have had mutton chops and freshly-killed poultry. Finding both too tough, he supped on a lemon and a piece of bread.

M’NICOL’S SCURRILOUS VOLUME.

The attacks of the angry critics, published as they were in fugitive pieces, might have been forgotten had they not been revived three or four years later in “a scurrilous volume,” as Boswell justly describes it, “larger than Johnson’s own, filled with malignant abuse under a name real or fictitious of some low man in an obscure corner of Scotland, though supposed to be the work of another Scotchman, who has found means to make himself well known both in Scotland and England.”[33] The “low man” was the Rev. Donald M’Nicol, and the “obscure corner” that long and pleasant island of Lismore which the steamers skirt every summer day as they pass with their load of tourists between Oban and the entrance of the Caledonian Canal. M’Nicol’s predecessor in the manse was the Rev. John Macaulay, whose famous grandson, Lord Macaulay, was to rebuke those “foolish and ignorant Scotchmen, who moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy in the Journey to the Western Islands, assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their country with libels much more dishonourable to their country than anything that he had ever said or written.”[34] When Johnson was shown M’Nicol’s book he said: “This fellow must be a blockhead. They don’t know how to go about their abuse. Who will read a five shilling book against me? No, Sir, if they had wit, they should have kept pelting me with pamphlets.” The book, however, seems to have been widely read, and in the year 1817 was reprinted at Glasgow in a fine large type. A Scotch gentleman recently told me that he fears that to many of his countrymen Johnson’s tour is only known through M’Nicol’s attack.

OSSIAN MACPHERSON.

It was Macpherson at whom Boswell aimed a blow when he wrote of the “other Scotchman whose work it was supposed to be.” If Ossian had no hand in it himself, it was certainly written by someone fired with all his hatred of the man who had branded him as a forger. Johnson is described as “a man of some reputation for letters, whose master-passion was hatred of Scotland. When the Poems of Ossian were published, and became the delight and admiration of the learned over all Europe, his cynical disposition instantly took the alarm.”[35] It was from this time that “we may date the origin of his intended tour to Scotland.” It was from malice that he started so late in the year—a malice, by the way, which nearly brought him to a watery grave. “It was not beauties he went to find out in Scotland, but defects; and for the northern situation of the Hebrides the advanced time of the year suited his purpose best.”[36] Johnson, with a discretion which other travellers in like circumstances would do well to imitate, had passed over Edinburgh with the remark that it is “a city too well known to admit description.” This wise reticence is twisted into a proof of malevolence. So, too, is the brevity with which he mentions Dundee. “We stopped awhile at Dundee,” he recorded, “where I remember nothing remarkable.”[37] Surely this is a very innocent sentence. Even Boswell, whose record was generally far fuller, dismisses this place with three words. “We saw Dundee,” he says.[38] But M’Nicol at once discovered the miserable jealousy of the Englishman. “He passes very rapidly through the town of Dundee, for fear, I suppose, of being obliged to take notice of its increasing trade.”[39] How delicately Johnson treated this town in his published narrative is shown by his description of it in his private letter to Mrs. Thrale. To her he had written: “We came to Dundee, a dirty despicable town.”[40] Much as M’Nicol belaboured Johnson, he could not refrain from claiming him as of Scotch origin. “We are much deceived by fame,” he wrote, “if a very near ancestor of his, who was a native of that country, did not find to his cost that a tree was not quite such a rarity in his days.”[41] This mysterious hero of the gallows was no doubt no Johnson at all, but a Johnston—of Ardnamurchan, probably, or of Glencroe.[42]

M’Nicol is ingenious in his treatment of the great Ossian controversy. “The poems,” he says, “must be the production either of Ossian or Mr. Macpherson. Dr. Johnson does not vouchsafe to tell us who else was the author, and consequently the national claim remains perfectly entire. The moment Mr. Macpherson ceases to be admitted as a translator, he instantly acquires a title to the original.”[43] Granted that he was a ruffian who had tried by menaces to hinder the detection of a cheat. What of that? He was a great original ruffian, and his cheat was a work of great original genius. So that Caledonia, if she had one forger the more, had not one poet the less. She made up in genius what she lost in character. But this Dr. Johnson failed to see, being, poor man, “naturally pompous and vain, and ridiculously ambitious of an exclusive reputation in letters.” It must have been this same pomposity, vanity, and ambition which led him to say of these poems: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”[44]

GLENCROE.

That Johnson’s narrative should have roused resentment is not surprising. Even his friend Beattie, “much as he loved and revered him,” yet found in it “some asperities that seem to be the effect of national prejudice.”[45] That “this true-born Englishman,” as Boswell delights to call him, should have given a wholly unprejudiced account of any country not his own was an impossibility. As regards Scotland, the position which he took certainly admitted of justification. “When I find,” he said, “a Scotchman to whom an Englishman is as a Scotchman, that Scotchman shall be as an Englishman to me.”[46] Boswell, and perhaps Boswell alone, exactly answered this requirement, and the two men were fast friends. For many other Scotchmen, indeed, he had strong feelings of regard, and even of friendship—for Andrew Millar the bookseller, for William Strahan the printer, for Blair, Beattie, John Campbell, Hailes, and Robertson, among authors, and for his poor assistants in the great work of his Dictionary, who all came from across the Tweed. There was no want of individual affection, no John Bull disinclination that had to be overcome in the case of each fresh acquaintance which he made. His “was a prejudice of the head and not of the heart.”[47] He held that the Scotch, with that clannishness which is found in almost equal strength in the outlying parts of the whole island, in Cornwall and in Cumberland, achieved for themselves in England “a success which rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit.”[48] Jesting with a friend from Ireland, who feared “he might treat the people of that country more unfavourably than he had done the Scotch,” he answered, “Sir, you have no reason to be afraid of me. The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir: the Irish are a fair people;—they never speak well of one another.”[49] To Boswell he began a letter, not meant, of course, for the public eye, by saying: “Knowing as you do the disposition of your countrymen to tell lies in favour of each other.”[50] When he came to write his Journey, he was led neither by timidity nor false delicacy to conceal what he thought. He attacks that “national combination so invidious that their friends cannot defend it,” which is one of the means whereby Scotchmen “find, or make their way to employment, riches, and distinction.”[51] He upbraids that “vigilance of jealousy which never goes to sleep,”[52] which sometimes led them to cross the borders of boastfulness and pass into falsehood, when Caledonia was their subject and Englishmen their audience. “A Scotchman,” he writes, “must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth; he will always love it better than inquiry.”[53] Even in his talk when among Scotchmen he was inclined “to expatiate rather too strongly upon the benefits derived to their country from the Union.”[54] “‘We have taught you,’ said he, ‘and we’ll do the same in time to all barbarous nations, to the Cherokees, and at last to the Ouran-Outangs,’ laughing with as much glee as if Monboddo had been present. Boswell. ‘We had wine before the Union.’ Johnson. ‘No, Sir; you had some weak stuff, the refuse of France, which would not make you drunk.’ Boswell. ‘I assure you, Sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness.’ Johnson. ‘No, Sir; there were people who died of dropsies, which they contracted in trying to get drunk.’”[55]

ATTACKS ON THE HIGHLANDERS.

Such pleasantry as this could hardly have given offence to anyone into whose skull a jest could penetrate by any operation short of a surgical one. But it was a very different matter when the spoken jest passed into a serious expression of opinion in print. All the theoretic philosophy of which Scotland justly boasts was hardly sufficient to support with patience such a passage as the following: “Till the Union made the Scots acquainted with English manners the culture of their lands was unskilful, and their domestic life unformed; their tables were coarse as the feasts of Esquimaux, and their houses filthy as the cottages of Hottentots.”[56] His attacks on the Highlanders would have been read with patience, if not with pleasure, in Lowland circles. “His account of the Isles,” wrote Beattie, “is, I dare say, very just. I never was there.”[57] These were not the “asperities” of which that amiable poet complained. Yet they were asperities which might have provoked an incensed Highlander to give the author “a crack on his skull,” had he looked not to the general tenour of the narrative, but to a few rough passages scattered up and down. M’Nicol would surely have roused the anger of his countrymen to a fiercer heat had he forborne to falsify Johnson’s words, and strung together instead a row of his sarcastic sayings. The offensive passages are not indeed numerous, but out of such a collection as the following irritation enough might have been provided: “the genuine improvidence of savages;”[58] “a muddy mixture of pride and ignorance;”[59] “the chiefs gradually degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords;”[60] “the animating rabble”[61] by which of old a chief was attended; “the rude speech of a barbarous people;”[62] “the laxity of their conversation, by which the inquirer, by a kind of intellectual retrogradation, knows less as he hears more;”[63] “the Caledonian bigotry” which helps “an inaccurate auditor” to believe in the genuineness of Ossian.[64]

To the sarcasms which had their foundation in Johnson’s dislike of Presbyterianism Lowlanders and Highlanders were equally exposed. On Knox and “the ruffians of reformation”[65] he has no mercy. It is true that he maintains that “we read with as little emotion the violence of Knox and his followers as the irruptions of Alaric and the Goths.”[66] But how deeply he was moved Boswell shows, where he describes him among the ruins of the once glorious magnificence of St. Andrews. “I happened to ask where John Knox was buried. Dr. Johnson burst out, ‘I hope in the high-way. I have been looking at his reformations.’”[67] The sight of the ruined houses of prayer in Skye drew from him the assertion that “the malignant influence of Calvinism has blasted ceremony and decency together.”[68] In another passage he describes the ancient “epidemical enthusiasm compounded of sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity, which, in a people whom idleness resigned to their own thoughts, was long transmitted in its full strength from the old to the young.”[69] Even for this inveterate ill a cure had at length been found. “By trade and intercourse with England it is visibly abating.”

THE TOUR TO THE WESTERN ISLES.

By the passages in which he described the bareness of the eastern coast the most irritation was caused. The very hedges were of stone, and not a tree was to be seen that was not younger than himself. “A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice.”[70] For this he was handled as roughly as Joseph’s brethren. He was little better than a spy who had come to see the nakedness of the land. The Scotchmen of that day could not know, as we know now, that “he treated Scotland no worse than he did even his best friends, whose characters he used to give as they appeared to him both in light and shade. ‘He was fond of discrimination,’ said Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘which he could not show without pointing out the bad as well as the good in every character.’”[71] If in his narrative he has not spared the shade, every fair-minded reader must allow that he has not been sparing of the light. John Wesley, who had often travelled over the same ground as far as Inverness, on May 18, 1776, recorded in his Journal at Aberdeen: “I read over Dr. Johnson’s Tour to the Western Isles. It is a very curious book, wrote with admirable sense, and, I think, great fidelity; although in some respects he is thought to bear hard on the nation, which I am satisfied he never intended.”[72]

JOHNSON’S COMPLIMENTS TO THE SCOTCH.

That Johnson was not careless of the good opinion of the Scotch is shown by his eagerness to learn what Boswell had to tell him about the book. “Let me know as fast as you read it how you like it; and let me know if any mistake is committed, or anything important left out.”[73] A week later he wrote: “I long to hear how you like the book; it is, I think, much liked here.” The modesty of the closing passage of his narrative should have done something towards disarming criticism. “Having passed my time almost wholly in cities, I may have been surprised by modes of life and appearances of nature that are familiar to men of wider survey and more varied conversation. Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little.”[74] The compliment which he paid to the society of the capital must surely have won some hearts. “I passed some days in Edinburgh,” he wrote, “with men of learning whose names want no advancement from my commemoration, or with women of elegance, which perhaps disclaims a pedant’s praise.”[75] He never lets slip an opportunity of gracefully acknowledging civilities and acts of kindness, or of celebrating worth and learning. As he closed his book, so he had opened it with a well-turned compliment. It was, he said, Boswell’s “acuteness and gaiety of conversation and civility of manners which induced him to undertake the journey.”[76] He praises the kindness with which he was gratified by the professors of St. Andrews, and “the elegance of lettered hospitality” with which he was entertained.[77] At Aberdeen the same grateful heart is seen. Among the professors he found one whom he had known twenty years earlier in London. “Such unexpected renewals of acquaintance may be numbered among the most pleasing incidents of life. The knowledge of one professor soon procured me the notice of the rest, and I did not want any token of regard.”[78] He had the freedom of the city conferred upon him. In acknowledging the honour he compliments the town at the expense of England, by mentioning a circumstance which, he says, “I am afraid I should not have had to say of any city south of the Tweed; I found no petty officer bowing for a fee.”[79] With Lord Monboddo he was never on friendly terms. “I knew that they did not love each other,” writes Boswell, with a studied softness of expression. Yet Johnson in his narrative praises “the magnetism of his conversation.”[80] With Lord Auchinleck he had that violent altercation which the unfortunate piety of the son forbade the biographer to exhibit for the entertainment of the public. Nevertheless, he only mentions his antagonist to compliment him.[81] If he attacked Presbyterianism, yet to the Presbyterian ministers in the Hebrides he was unsparing of his praise. He celebrates their learning, which was the more admirable as they were men “who had no motive to study but generous curiosity or desire of usefulness.”[82] However much he differed from “the learned Mr. Macqueen” about Ossian, yet he admits that “his knowledge and politeness give him a title equally to kindness and respect.”[83] With the aged minister of Col he had a wrangle over Bayle, and Clarke, and Leibnitz. “Had he been softer with this venerable old man,” writes Boswell, “we might have had more conversation.”[84] This rebuke Johnson read in Boswell’s manuscript. The amends which he makes is surely ample. He describes the minister’s “look of venerable dignity, excelling what I remember in any other man. I lost some of his goodwill by treating a heretical writer with more regard than in his opinion a heretic could deserve. I honoured his orthodoxy, and did not much censure his asperity. A man who has settled his opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his conviction disturbed; and at seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.”[85]

The people he praises no less than their ministers. “Civility,” he says, “seems part of the national character of Highlanders. Every chieftain is a monarch, and politeness, the natural product of royal government, is diffused from the Laird through the whole clan.”[86] He describes the daughter of the man who kept the hut in Glenmorison, where he passed a night. “Her conversation like her appearance was gentle and pleasing. We knew that the girls of the Highlanders are all gentlewomen, and treated her with great respect, which she received as customary and due.”[87] He praises the general hospitality. “Wherever there is a house the stranger finds a welcome. If his good fortune brings him to the residence of a gentleman he will be glad of a storm to prolong his stay.”[88] How graceful is the compliment which he pays to Macleod of Rasay! “Rasay has little that can detain a traveller except the Laird and his family; but their power wants no auxiliaries. Such a seat of hospitality amidst the winds and waters fills the imagination with a delightful contrariety of images. Without is the rough ocean and the rocky land, the beating billows and the howling storm; within is plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance. In Rasay if I could have found a Ulysses I had fancied a PhÆacia.”[89] To the other branch of the Macleods he is no less complimentary. “At Dunvegan I had tasted lotus,” he wrote, “and was in danger of forgetting that I was ever to depart.”[90] He met Flora Macdonald, and does not let the occasion pass to pay her a high compliment. “Hers is a name that will be mentioned in history, and, if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.”[91] In fact, he rarely introduces in his narrative any living person but in way of compliment or acknowledgment. “He speaks ill of nobody but Ossian,” said Lord Mansfield, Scotchman though he was.[92] “There has been of late,” he once said, “a strange turn in travellers to be displeased.”[93] There was no such turn in him. From the beginning to the end of his narrative, there is not a single grumble. In Mull last summer I had the pleasure of meeting an old general, a Highlander, who had seen a great deal of rough service in the East Indies. Someone in the company let drop an unfavourable remark on Johnson. “I lately read his Journey,” the general replied, “and when I thought of his age, his weak health, and the rudeness of the accommodation in those old days, I was astonished at finding that he never complained.” In his food he had a relish for what was nice and delicate. Yet he records that “he only twice found any reason to complain of a Scottish table. He that shall complain of his fare in the Hebrides has improved his delicacy more than his manhood.”[94] “If an epicure,” he says in another passage, “could remove by a wish in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.”[95] Boswell, we read, “was made uneasy and almost fretful” by their bad accommodation in the miserable inn at Glenelg. “Dr. Johnson was calm. I said he was so from vanity. Johnson. ‘No, Sir, it is from philosophy.’”[96] The same philosophy accompanied him not only through his journey, but through his letters and his narrative. Nearly five weeks after he had left Edinburgh he wrote to Mrs. Thrale: “The hill Rattiken and the inn at Glenelg were the only things of which we or travellers yet more delicate could find any pretensions to complain.”[97] Yet he was by no means free from bodily troubles, as his letters show. He was “miserably deaf,” he wrote at one time, and was still suffering from the remains of inflammation in the eye, he wrote at another time. His nerves seemed to be growing weaker. The climate, he thought, “perhaps not within his degree of healthy latitude.”[98] The climate, indeed, had been at its worst. In all September he had only one day and a half of fair weather, and in October perhaps not more.[99] Kept indoors as he was by the rain, he often suffered under the additional discomfort of bad accommodation. Two nights he passed in wretched huts; one in a barn; two in the miserable cabin of a small trading-ship; one in a room where the floor was mire. Even in some of the better houses he had not always a chamber to himself at night, while in the daytime privacy and quiet were not to be enjoyed. At Corrichatachin, where he twice made a stay, “we had,” writes Boswell, “no rooms that we could command; for the good people had no notion that a man could have any occasion but for a mere sleeping place; so, during the day, the bed-chambers were common to all the house. Servants eat in Dr. Johnson’s, and mine was a kind of general rendezvous of all under the roof, children and dogs not excepted.”[100]

He not only passes over in silence the weariness and discomforts of his tour, but he understates the risks which he ran. On that dark and stormy October night, when the frail vessel in which he had embarked was driven far out of its course to Col, he was in great danger. “‘Thank God, we are safe!’ cried the young Laird, as at last they spied the harbour of Lochiern.”[101] This scene of peril, of which Boswell gives a spirited description, is dismissed by Johnson in his letter to Mrs. Thrale in a few words: “A violent gust, which Bos. had a great mind to call a tempest, forced us into Col, an obscure island.”[102] In his narrative, if he makes a little more of it, he does so, it seems, only for the sake of paying a compliment to the seamanship of Maclean of Col.[103] It was this stormy night, especially, that was in Sir Walter Scott’s mind when he described “the whole expedition as being highly perilous, considering the season of the year, the precarious chance of getting seaworthy boats, and the ignorance of the Hebrideans, who are very careless and unskilful sailors.”[104]

If votive offerings have been made to the God of storms by those who have escaped the perils of the deep, surely some tall column might well be raised on the entrance to Lochiern by the gratitude of the readers of the immortal Life. Had the ship been overwhelmed, not only the hero, but his biographer, would have perished. One more great man would have been added to the sad long list of those of whom the poet sang:

“Omnes illacrimabiles

Urguentur, ignotique longa

Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.”

“In endless night they sleep unwept, unknown,

No bard had they to make all time their own.”[105]

By the men of Johnson’s time the journey was looked upon as one of real adventure. When Boswell visited Voltaire at Ferney, and mentioned their design of taking this tour, “he looked at him as if he had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, ‘You do not insist on my accompanying you?’ ‘No, Sir.’ ‘Then I am very willing you should go.’”[106] Dr. Percy, of the Reliques, wrote from Alnwick Castle that a gentleman who had lately returned from the Hebrides, had told him that the two travellers were detained prisoners in Skye, their return having been intercepted by the torrents. “Sir Alexander Macdonald and his lady,” Percy adds, “at whose house our friend Johnson is a captive, had made their escape before the floods cut off their retreat; so that possibly we may not see our friend till next summer releases him.”[107] A Glasgow newspaper gave much the same report, but attributed his delay to the danger of crossing in the late autumn “such a stormy surge in a small boat.”[108] On the Island of Col they were indeed storm-bound for eleven days. “On the travellers’ return to Edinburgh,” writes Boswell, “everybody had accosted us with some studied compliment. Dr. Johnson said, ‘I am really ashamed of the congratulations which we receive. We are addressed as if we had made a voyage to Nova Zembla, and suffered five persecutions in Japan.’”[109] Dr. Robertson “had advanced to him repeating a line of Virgil, which I forget,” Boswell adds. “I suppose either,

Post varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,[110]

or

—multum ille et terris jactatus et alto.[111]

Johnson afterwards remarked that to see a man come up with a formal air and a Latin line, when we had no fatigue and no danger, was provoking.” Of exaggeration he had always a strong hatred, and would not allow it in his own case any more than in another’s. He had undergone great fatigue, and he had been in real danger, but of both he made light. JOHNSON’S DELIGHT IN HIS TOUR.It was in high spirits that he returned home after his tour of a hundred days. “I came home last night,” he wrote to Boswell, “and am ready to begin a new journey.”[112] He had fulfilled his long-cherished wish, and no wonder his spirits were high. His father, the old Lichfield bookseller, had put into his hands when he was very young Martin’s Description of the Western Islands, and had thus roused his youthful fancy.[113] His longing to visit the wild scenes of which he had read in his childhood would in all likelihood have remained ungratified, had it not been for Boswell. He had known that lively young gentleman but a very few weeks, when, over supper “in a private room at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house in the Strand,” he promised to accompany him to the Hebrides.[114] Ten years elapsed before the promise was fulfilled. “I cannot but laugh,” he said at Armidale in Skye, “to think of myself roving among the Hebrides at sixty.[115] I wonder where I shall rove at four-score.”[116] To Mrs. Thrale soon after his birthday he wrote: “You remember the Doge of Genoa, who being asked what struck him most at the French Court, answered, ‘Myself.’ I cannot think many things here more likely to affect the fancy, than to see Johnson ending his sixty-fourth year in the wilderness of the Hebrides.”[117] “Little did I once think,” he wrote another day, “of seeing this region of obscurity, and little did you once expect a salutation from this verge of European life. I have now the pleasure of going where nobody goes, and seeing what nobody sees.”[118] So close to this verge did Mrs. Thrale suppose he was, that she thought that he was in sight of Iceland.[119] She and his friends of the Mitre or the Literary Club would have been astonished could they have seen him that night in Col when “he strutted about the room with a broad-sword and target,” and that other night when Boswell “put a large blue bonnet on the top of his bushy grey wig.”[120]

ARMIDALE.

The motives which led him on his adventurous journey were not those which every summer and autumn bring travellers in swarms, not only from England, but from the mainland of Europe, from across the wide Atlantic, from India, from Southern Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to these Highlands of poetry and romance. “I got,” he said, “an acquisition of more ideas by my tour than by anything that I remember. I saw quite a different system of life.”[121] It was life, not scenery, which he went to study. On his return to the south of Scotland he was asked “how he liked the Highlands. The question seemed to irritate him, for he answered, ‘How, Sir, can you ask me what obliges me to speak unfavourably of a country where I have been hospitably entertained? Who can like the Highlands? I like the inhabitants very well.’”[122] The love of wild scenery was in truth only beginning as his life was drawing to its close. “It is but of late,” wrote Pennant in 1772, “that the North Britons became sensible of the beauties of their country; but their search is at present amply rewarded. Very lately a cataract of uncommon height was discovered on the Bruar.”[123] Fifteen years later Burns, in his Humble Petition of Bruar Water, shows that the discovery had been followed up:

“Here haply too at vernal dawn

Some musing Bard may stray,

And eye the smoking dewy lawn

And misty mountain grey.”

THE DISCOVERY OF STAFFA.

But in the year 1773 Johnson could say without much, if indeed any exaggeration, that “to the southern inhabitants of Scotland the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo and Sumatra; of both they have only heard a little and guess the rest.”[124] Staffa had been just discovered by Sir Joseph Banks. It seems almost passing belief, but yet it is strictly true, that Staffa—Staffa, as one of the wonders of creation—was unknown till the eve of Johnson’s visit to the Hebrides. The neighbouring islanders of course had seen it, but had seen it without curiosity or emotion. They were like the impassive Frenchman who lived in Paris throughout the whole of the Reign of Terror, and did not notice that anything remarkable went on. It was on August 12, 1772, a day which should for ever be famous in the annals of discovery, that Banks coming to anchor in the Sound of Mull, “was asked ashore” by Mr. Macleane of Drumnen. At his house he met with one Mr. Leach, an English gentleman, who told him that at the distance of about nine leagues lay an island, unvisited even by the Highlanders, with pillars on it like those of the Giant’s Causeway.[125]

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE
& RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON

IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^IE. PARIS.

STAFFA

No yachtsman as yet threaded his way through the almost countless islets of our western seas; the only sails as yet reflected on the unruffled surface of the land-locked firths were the fisher’s and the trader’s. For the sea as yet love was neither felt nor affected. There was no gladness in its dark-blue waters. Fifteen years were to pass before Byron was born—the first of our poets, it has been said, who sang the delights of sailing. A ship was still “a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”[126] No Southerner went to the Highlands to hunt, or shoot, or fish. No one sought there a purer air. It was after Johnson’s tour that an English writer urged the citizens of Edinburgh to plant trees in the neighbourhood of their town because “the increase of vegetation would purify the air, and dispel those putrid and noxious vapours which are frequently wafted from the Highlands.”[127] It was on an early day of August, in a finer season than had been known for years, that Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, complained that neither temperance nor exercise could preserve him in any tolerable health in the unfriendly climate of Loch Lomond.[128] Of all the changes which have come over our country, perhaps none was more unforeseen than the growth of this passion for the Highlands and the Hebrides. Could Johnson have learnt from some one gifted with prophetic power that there were passages in his narrative which would move the men of the coming century to scoff, it was not his references to scenery which would have roused his suspicion. I have heard a Scotchman laugh uproariously over his description of a mountain as “a considerable protuberance.” He did not know however where the passage came, and he admitted that, absurd as it was, it was not quite so ridiculous when taken with the context. “Another mountain,” said Boswell, “I called immense. ‘No,’ replied Johnson, ‘it is no more than a considerable protuberance.’”[129] It was his hatred of exaggeration and love of accurate language which provoked the correction—the same hatred and the same love which led him at college to check his comrades if they called a thing “prodigious.”[130] But to us, nursed as we have been and our fathers before us in a romantic school, the language of Johnson and of his contemporaries about the wild scenes of nature never fails to rouse our astonishment and our mirth. Were they to come back to earth, I do not know but that at our extravagancies of admiration and style, our affectations in the tawdry art of “word-painting,” and at our preference of barren mountains to the meadow-lands, and corn-fields, and woods, and orchards, and quiet streams of southern England, their strong and manly common sense might not fairly raise a still heartier laugh.

MOUNTAIN SCENERY.

The ordinary reader is apt to attribute to an insensibility to beauty in Johnson what, to a great extent, was common to most of the men of his time. It is true that for the beauties of nature, whether wild or tame, his perception was by no means quick. Nevertheless, we find his indifference to barren scenery largely shared in by men of poetic temperament. Even Gray, who looked with a poet’s eye on the crags and cliffs and torrents by which his path wound along as he went up to the Grande Chartreuse, yet, early in September, when the heather would be all in bloom, writes of crossing in Perthshire “a wide and dismal heath fit for an assembly of witches.”[131] Wherever he wandered he loved to find the traces of men. It was not desolation, but the earth as the beautiful home of man that moved him and his fellows. Mentem mortalia tangunt. He found the Apennines not so horrid as the Alps, because not only the valleys but even the mountains themselves were many of them cultivated within a little of their very tops.[132] The fifth Earl of Carlisle, a poet though not a Gray, in August, 1768, hurried faster even than the post across the Tyrol from Verona to Mannheim, “because there was nothing but rest that was worth stopping one moment for.” The sameness of the scenery was wearisome to his lordship, “large rocky mountains, covered with fir-trees; a rapid river in the valley; the road made like a shelf on the side of the hill.” He rejoiced when he took his leave of the Alps, and came upon “fields very well cultivated, valleys with rich verdure, and little woods which almost persuaded him he was in England.”[133]

LOCH NESS, NEAR FOYERS.

There is a passage in Camden’s description of Argyleshire in which we find feelings expressed which for the next two centuries were very generally entertained. “Along the shore,” he writes, “the country is more unpleasant in sight, what with rocks and what with blackish barren mountains.”[134] One hundred and fifty years after this was written, an Englishman, describing in 1740 the beautiful road which runs along the south-eastern shore of Loch Ness, calls the rugged mountains “those hideous productions of nature.”[135] He pictures to himself the terror which would come upon the Southerner who “should be brought blindfold into some narrow rocky hollow, inclosed with these horrid prospects, and there should have his bandage taken off. He would be ready to die with fear, as thinking it impossible he should ever get out to return to his native country.”[136] This account was very likely read by Johnson, for it was published in London only nineteen years before he made his tour. In the narrative of a Volunteer in the Duke of Cumberland’s army, we find the same gloom cast by mountain scenery on the spirits of Englishmen. The soldiers who were encamped near Loch Ness fell sick daily in their minds as well as in their bodies from nothing but the sadness produced by the sight of the black barren mountains covered with snow, with streams of water rolling down them. To divert their melancholy, which threatened to develop even into hypochondriacal madness, races were held. It was with great joy that the volunteer at last “turned his back upon these hideous mountains and the noisy ding of the great falls of waters.”[137]

Even the dales of Cumberland struck strangers with awe. Six months before Wordsworth was born, Gray wandered up Borrowdale to the point where now the long train of tourist-laden coaches day after day in summer turns to the right towards Honister Pass and Buttermere. “All farther access,” he wrote, “is here barred to prying mortals, only there is a little path winding over the Fells, and for some weeks in the year passable to the Dale’s-men; but the mountains know well that these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their ancient kingdom, the reign of Chaos and Old Night.”[138]

THE MELANCHOLY HIGHLANDS.

A few days after Johnson had arrived in Scotland, Mason, the poet, visited Keswick. Many of the woods which had charmed his friend Gray had been since cut down, and a dry season had reduced the cascade to scanty rills. “With the frightful and surprising only,” he wrote, “I cannot be pleased.”[139] He and his companion climbed to the summit of Skiddaw, where, just as if they were on the top of the Matterhorn, they found that “respiration seemed to be performed with a kind of asthmatic oppression.”[140] To John Wesley, a traveller such as few men have ever been, wild scenery was no more pleasing than to the man who wandered for the first time. Those “horrid mountains” he twice calls the fine ranges of hills in the North Riding of Yorkshire, whose waters feed the Swale and the Tees, though it was in summer-time that he was travelling.[141] To Pennant Glencroe was “the seat of melancholy.”[142] Beattie, Burns’s “sweet harmonious Beattie,” finds the same sadness in the mountains:

“The Highlands of Scotland” (he writes) “are a picturesque, but in general a melancholy country. Long tracts of mountainous desert, covered with dark heath, and often obscured by misty weather; narrow valleys, thinly inhabited and bounded by precipices resounding with the fall of torrents; a soil so rugged, and a climate so dreary, as in many parts to admit neither the amusements of pasturage nor the labours of agriculture; the mournful dashing of waves along the friths and lakes that intersect the country; the portentous noises which every change of the wind, and every increase and diminution of the waters, is apt to raise in a lonely region full of echoes, and rocks, and caverns; the grotesque and ghastly appearance of such a landscape by the light of the moon—objects like these diffuse a gloom over the fancy which may be compatible enough with occasional and social merriment, but cannot fail to tincture the thoughts of a native in the hour of silence and solitude.”[143]

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE
& RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON

IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^IE. PARIS.

LOCH NESS

The French writer, Faujas de Saint Fond, who visited the Highlands about the year 1780, was touched with the same unromantic gloom. When on his way from the barren mountains of the north he reached the fertile southern shore of Loch Tay, and caught the first glimpse of the change to happier climes, his soul experienced as sweet a joy as is given by the first breath of spring. He had escaped from a land where winter seemed eternally to reign, where all was wild, and barren, and sad.[144] Even Macleod of Macleod, the proprietor of nine inhabited isles and of islands uninhabited almost beyond number, who held four times as much land as the Duke of Bedford, even that “mighty monarch,” as Johnson called him,[145] looked upon life in his castle at Dunvegan as “confinement in a remote corner of the world,” and upon the Western Islands as “dreary regions.”[146] Slight, then, must have been the shock which Johnson gave even to the poets among his fellows, when on “a delightful day” in April, he set Fleet Street with its “cheerful scene” above TempÉ, and far above Mull.[147] To the men of his time rocks would have “towered in horrid nakedness,”[148] and “wandering in Skye” would have seemed “a toilsome drudgery.”[149] Nature there would have looked “naked,” and these poverty-stricken regions “malignant.”[150] Few would have been “the allurements of these islands,” for “desolation and penury” would have given as “little pleasure” to them as it did to him.[151] In Glencroe they would have found “a black and dreary region,”[152] and in Mull “a gloomy desolation.”[153] Everywhere “they would have been repelled by the wide extent of hopeless sterility,”[154] and everywhere fatigued by the want of “variety in universal barrenness.”[155] In the midst of such scenes, as the autumn day was darkening to its close, they would have allowed that, “when there is a guide whose conduct may be trusted, a mind not naturally too much disposed to fear, may preserve some degree of cheerfulness; but what,” they would have asked, “must be the solicitude of him who should be wandering among the crags and hollows benighted, ignorant, and alone?”[156] Upon the islets on Loch Lomond they would have longed “to employ all the arts of embellishment,” so that these little spots should no longer “court the gazer at a distance, but disgust him at his approach, when he finds instead of soft lawns and shady thickets nothing more than uncultivated ruggedness.”[157] Everywhere they would have regretted the want of the arts and civilization and refinements of modern life.

INDIFFERENCE TO SCENERY.

Had Johnson been treated more kindly by the weather, doubtless the gloom of the landscape would have been less reflected upon his pages. Fifty-eight days of rain to three days of clear skies would have been sufficient to depress even the wildest worshipper of rude nature. In the eleven days in which he was kept prisoner by storms in Col, he had “no succession of sunshine to rain, or of calms to tempests; wind and rain were the only weather.”[158] When the sun did shine he lets us catch a little of its cheerful light. His first day’s Highland journey took him along the shore of Loch Ness in weather that was bright, though not hot. “The way was very pleasant; on the left were high and steep rocks, shaded with birch, and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Loch Ness were beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle undulation.”[159] The morrow was equally fine. How prettily he has described his rest in the valley on the bank, where he first thought of writing the story of his tour, “with a clear rivulet streaming at his feet. The day was calm, the air was soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude.”[160] Very different would have been the tale which he told had he travelled in the days of fast and commodious steamboats, good roads and carriages, comfortable inns, post-offices, telegraphs, and shops. He would not have seen a different system of life, or got an acquisition of ideas, but he might have found patience, and even promptings for descriptions of the beauties of rugged nature. “In an age when every London citizen makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben Nevis,”[161] the old man may easily be mocked, for his indifference to scenery. But the elderly traveller of our times, who whirled along “in a well-appointed four-horse coach,” indicates the beauties of nature to his companions, and utters exclamations of delight, as from time to time he takes his cigar from his lips, might have felt as little enthusiasm as Johnson, had he had, like him, to cross Skye and Mull on horseback, by paths so narrow that each rider had to go singly, and so craggy that constant care was required.

LOCH LOMOND.

The scenery in which he took most delight was the park-lands of southern and midland England.

“Where lawns extend that scorn Arcadian pride,

And brighter streams than fam’d Hydaspes glide.

There all around the gentlest breezes stray,

There gentle music melts on every spray;

Creation’s mildest charms are there combin’d,

Extremes are only in the master’s mind.”[162]

“Sweet Auburn” would have been dearer to him than all the wilds of the Highlands. But Auburn scenery he did not find even in the Lowlands. Had Goldsmith passed his life in Ayrshire or even in “pleasant Teviotdale,” the Deserted Village would never have been written. Burns had never seen an Auburn, nor even that simpler rural beauty which was so dear to Wordsworth. No “lovely cottage in the guardian nook” had “stirred him deeply.” He knew nothing of the sacredness of

“The roses to the porch which they entwine.”[163]

In Scotland was seen the reverse of the picture in which Goldsmith had painted Italy.

“In florid beauty groves and fields appear,

Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.”[164]

POVERTY OF LANDSCAPE.

In Scotland man was nourished to the most stubborn strength of character, but beauty was the growth that dwindled. In the hard struggle for bare living, and in the gloom of a religion which gave strength but crushed loveliness, no man thought of adorning his home as if it had been his bride. Wordsworth compared the manses in Scotland with the parsonages, even the poor parsonages in England, and said that neither they nor their gardens and grounds had the same “attractive appearance.”[165] The English country-house, with its lawns, its gardens, and its groves, which adds such a singular charm to our landscape, had not its counterpart on the other side of the border. Elderly men could still recall the day when the approach to the laird’s dwelling led past the stable and the cow-house, when the dunghill was heaped up close to the hall-door, and when, instead of lawns and beds of flowers, all around grew a plentiful crop of nettles, docks, and hemlocks.[166] Some improvement had been already made. A taste had happily begun for “neat houses and ornamental fields,” and to the hopeful patriot there was “the pleasing prospect that Scotland might in a century or sooner compare with England, not indeed in magnificence of country-seats, but in sweetness and variety of concordant parts.”[167] Even at that time it supplied England with its best gardeners,[168] and nevertheless it was a country singularly bare of gardens. “Pray, now, are you ever able to bring the sloe to perfection?” asked Johnson of Boswell.[169] So far was nature from being adorned that she had been everywhere stripped naked. Woods had been cut down, not even had groups of trees been spared, no solitary oak or elm with its grateful shade stood in the middle of the field or in the hedge-row; hedge-rows there were none. The pleasantness of the prospect had been everywhere sacrificed to the productiveness of the field. The beautiful English landscape was gone. “The striking characteristic in the views of Scotland,” said an observant traveller, “is a poverty of landscape from a want of objects, particularly of wood. Park scenery is little known. The lawn, the clump, and the winding walk are rarely found.”[170] As he crossed the border he might have said with Johnson: “It is only seeing a worse England. It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk.”[171] “Every part of the country,” wrote Goldsmith from Edinburgh in his student days, “presents the same dismal landscape. No grove nor brook lend their music to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty.”[172] There was none of “the bloomy flush of life.” The whole country was open, and resembled one vast common with a few scattered improvements.[173] Along the western road from Longworth to Dumfries it exhibited “a picture of dreary solitude, of smoky hovels, naked, ill-cultivated fields, lean cattle and a dejected people, without manufactures, trade or shipping.”[174]

The eastern coast, along which Johnson travelled, was singularly bare of trees. He had not, he said, passed five on the road fit for the carpenter.[175] The first forest trees of full growth which he saw were in the north of Aberdeenshire.[176] “This is a day of novelties,” he said on the morrow. “I have seen old trees in Scotland, and I have heard the English clergy treated with disrespect.”[177] Topham, while attacking his Journey to the Western Isles, yet admitted that it was only in the parks of a few noblemen that oaks were found fifty years old.[178] Lord Jeffrey maintained so late as 1833 that within a circle of twenty miles from Watford there was more old timber than in all Scotland.[179] Burns, in his Humble Petition of Bruar Water to the Duke of Athole, testifies to the want of trees:—

There were, of course, noble trees scattered throughout the country. Gray describes “the four chestnuts of vast bulk and height in Lord Breadalbane’s park,”[180] and Pennant, “the venerable oaks, the vast chestnuts, the ash trees, and others of ancient growth, that gave solemnity to the scene at Finlarig Castle.”[181] A love of planting, which began about the time of the Union, was gradually extending. Defoe noticed the young groves round the gentlemen’s houses in the Lothians, and foretold, that in a few years Scotland would not need to send to Norway for timber and deal.[182] The reviewer of Pennant’s Tour in the Scots Magazine for January, 1772, rejoiced to find that the spirit of planting was so generally diffused, and looked forward to the advantages arising from it, which would be enjoyed by posterity.[183] Sir Walter Scott defended Johnson against the abuse which had unjustly been cast on him. The east coast, if the young plantations were excepted, was as destitute of wood as he had described it.[184] Nay, to his sarcasms he greatly ascribed that love of planting which had almost become a passion.[185] It was not for nothing, then, that Johnson had joked over the loss of his walking-stick in Mull, and had refused to believe that any man in that island who had got it would part with it. “Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece of timber there.”[186]

BACKWARDNESS OF FARMING.

The modern traveller who, as he passes through the Lothians or Aberdeenshire, looks with admiration on farming in its perfection, would learn with astonishment how backward Scotch agriculture was little more than one hundred years ago. While in England men of high rank and strong minds were ambitious of shining in the characters of farmers, in Scotland it was looked upon as a pursuit far beneath the attention of a gentleman. Neither by the learned had it been made a study.[187] There were those who attributed this general backwardness to the soil and climate; but it was due, said Lord Kames, “to the indolence of the landholders, the obstinate indocility of the peasantry, and the stupid attachment of both classes to ancient habits and practices.”[188] The liberal intercourse between the two countries, which was an unexpected result of the Rebellion of 1745, greatly quickened the rate of improvement.

“Before that time the people of Northumberland and the Merse, who spoke dialects of the same language, and were only separated by a river, had little more intercourse than those of Kent and Normandy. After the Rebellion a number of noblemen and gentlemen amused themselves with farming in the English style. The late Lord Eglinton spared no expense in getting English servants. He showed his countrymen what might be done by high cultivation. Mr. Drummond, of Blair, sent over one of his ploughmen to learn drill husbandry, and the culture of turnips from Lord Eglinton’s English servants. The very next year he raised a field of turnips, which were the first in the country. And they were as neatly dressed as any in Hertfordshire. A single horse ploughing the drills astonished the country people, who, till then, had never seen fewer than four yoked. About the year 1771 our tenants were well-disposed to the culture of turnips. They begin to have an idea of property in winter as well as in summer; nor is it any longer thought bad neighbourhood to drive off cattle that are trespassing upon their winter crops.”[189]

The young Laird of Col, just before Johnson’s visit, had gone to Hertfordshire to study farming, and had brought back “the culture of turnips. His intention is to provide food for his cattle in the winter. This innovation was considered by Mr. Macsweyn as the idle project of a young head heated with English fancies; but he has now found that turnips will grow, and that hungry sheep and cows will really eat them.”[190] Yet progress was not so rapid but that Adam Smith held that a better system could only be introduced “by a long course of frugality and industry; half a century or a century more perhaps must pass away before the old system which is wearing out gradually can be completely abolished.”[191]

The cultivation of vegetables for the table and of fruits was also taking a start, though much remained to be done. When Johnson was informed at Aberdeen that Cromwell’s soldiers had taught the Scotch to raise cabbages, he remarked, that “in the passage through villages it seems to him that surveys their gardens, that when they had not cabbage they had nothing.”[192] Pennant, however, the year before, in riding from Arbroath to Montrose, had passed by “extensive fields of potatoes—a novelty till within the last twenty years.”[193] It was not till Johnson had travelled beyond Elgin that he saw houses with fruit trees about them. “The improvements of the Scotch,” he remarks, “are for immediate profit; they do not yet think it quite worth their while to plant what will not produce something to be eaten or sold in a very little time.”[194] The Scotch historian of Edinburgh complained that “the apples which were brought to market from the neighbourhood were unfit for the table.”[195] “Good apples are not to be seen,” wrote Topham in his Letters from Edinburgh. “It was,” he said, “owing to the little variety of fruit that the inhabitants set anything on their tables after dinner that has the appearance of it, and I have often observed at the houses of principal people a plate of small turnips introduced in the dessert, and eaten with avidity.”[196] Smollett indirectly alludes to this reflection on his native country when, in his Humphry Clinker, he says that “turnips make their appearance, not as dessert, but by way of hors d’oeuvres, or whets.”[197] Even in the present day, the English traveller far too often looks in vain for the orchards and the fruit tree with its branches trained over the house-wall. Yet great progress has been made. In Morayshire, in the present day, peaches and apricots are seen ripening on the garden walls. In the year 1852 an Elgin gardener carried off the first prize of the London Horticultural Society for ten varieties of the finest new dessert pears.[198] If Scotland can do such great things as this, surely justification is found for the reproaches cast by Johnson on Scottish ignorance and negligence.

ENGLISH IGNORANCE OF SCOTLAND.

So closely have the two countries in late years been drawn together by the wonderful facilities of intercourse afforded by modern inventions, that it is scarcely possible for us to understand the feelings of our adventurous forefathers as they crossed the Borders. At the first step they seemed to be in a foreign country. “The first town we come to,” wrote Defoe, “is as perfectly Scots as if you were one hundred miles north of Edinburgh; nor is there the least appearance of anything English either in customs, habits, usages of the people, or in their way of living, eating, dress, or behaviour.”[199] “The English,” Smollett complained, “knew as little of Scotland as of Japan.”[200] There is no reason to think that he was guilty of extravagance, when in his Humphry Clinker he makes Miss Tabitha Bramble, the sister of the Gloucestershire squire, imagine that “she could not go to Scotland but by sea.”[201] It is amazing to how late a day ignorance almost as gross as this came down. It was in the year in which George II. came to the throne that Defoe, in his preface to his Tour through Great Britain wrote:—“Scotland has been supposed by some to be so contemptible a place as that it would not bear a description.”[202] Eleven years later, in 1738, we find it described much as if it were some lately discovered island in the South Seas.

“The people in general,” we read, “are naturally inclined to civility, especially to strangers. They are divided into Highlanders who call themselves the antient Scots, and into Lowlanders who are a mixture of antient Scots, Picts, Britons, French, English, Danes, Germans, Hungarians, and others. Buchanan describes the customs of the Highlanders graphically thus:—‘In their diet, apparel, and household furniture they follow the parsimony of the antients; they provide their diet by fishing and hunting, and boil their flesh in the paunch or skin of a beast; while they hunt they eat it raw, after having squeezed out the blood.’... The Western Islands (the author goes on to add) lie in the Deucaledonian Sea.... The natives of Mull when the season is moist take a large dose of aqua-vitÆ for a corrective, and chew a piece of charmel root when they intend to be merry to prevent drunkenness. The natives of Skye have a peculiar way of curing the distempers they are incident to by simples of their own product, in which they are successful to a miracle.”[203]

Into so strange and wild a country it required a stout heart to enter. A volunteer with the English army at the time of the Rebellion of 1745 wrote from Berwick:—“Now we are going into Scotland, but with heavy hearts. They tell us here what terrible living we shall have there, which I soon after found too true.”[204] How few were the Englishmen who crossed the Tweed even so late as 1772 is shown by the hope expressed in the Scots Magazine for that year, that the publication of Pennant’s Tour would excite others to follow in his steps.[205] Two years later Topham wrote from Edinburgh that “the common people were astonished to find himself and his companion become stationary in their town for a whole winter.... ‘What were we come for?’ was the first question. ‘They presumed to study physic.’ ‘No.’ ‘To study law?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then it must be divinity.’ ‘No.’ ‘Very odd,’ they said, ‘that we should come to Edinburgh without one of these reasons.’”[206] How ignorant the English were of Scotland is shown by the publication of Humphry Clinker. The ordinary reader, as he laughs over the pages of this most humorous of stories, never suspects that the author in writing it had any political object in view. Yet there is not a little truth in Horace Walpole’s bitter assertion that it is “a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots, and cry down juries.”[207] It was not so much a party as a patriotic novel. Lord Bute’s brief tenure of ignoble office as Prime Minister and King’s Friend, the mischief which he had done to the whole country, and the favour which he had shown to his North Britons, a few years earlier had raised a storm against the Scotch which had not yet subsided. “All the windows of all the inns northwards,” wrote Smollett, “are scrawled with doggrel rhymes in abuse of the Scotch nation.”[208] With great art he takes that fine old humorist, Matthew Bramble, from his squire’s house in Gloucestershire on a tour to the southern part of Scotland, and makes him and his family send to their various correspondents lively and pleasant descriptions of all that they saw. At the very time that he was writing his Humphry Clinker a child was born in one of the narrow Wynds of Edinburgh who was to take up the work which he had begun, and as the mighty Wizard of the North, as if by an enchanter’s wand, to lift up the mist which had long hung over the land which he loved so well, and to throw over Highlands and Lowlands alike the beauty of romance and the kindliness of feeling which springs from the associations given by poetry and fiction.

While the English as yet knew little of Scotland, the Scotch were not equally ignorant of England. From the days of the Union they had pressed southwards in the pursuit of wealth, of fame, and of position. Their migration was such that it afforded some foundation for Johnson’s saying that “the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.”[209] England was swiftly moving along the road to Empire, sometimes with silent foot, sometimes with the tramp of war. In America and in the East Indies her boundaries were year by year pushed farther and farther on. Her agriculture, her manufactures, her trade and her commerce were advancing by leaps and bounds. There was a great stir of life and energy. Into such a world the young Scotchmen entered with no slight advantages. In their common schools everywhere an education was given such as in England was only to be had in a few highly favoured spots. In their universities even the neediest scholar had a share. The hard fare, the coarse clothing, and the poor lodgings with which their students were contented, could be provided by the labours of the vacation. In their homes they had been trained in habits of thrift. They entered upon the widely extending battle of life like highly trained soldiers, and they gained additional force by acting together. If they came up “in droves,” it was not one another that they butted. They exhibited when in a strange land that “national combination” which Johnson found “so invidious,” but which brought them to “employment, riches, and distinction.”[210] Their thrift, and an eagerness to push on which sometimes amounted to servility, provoked many a gibe; but if ever they found time and inclination to turn from Johnny Home to Shakespeare they might have replied in the words of Ferdinand:

“Some kinds of baseness

Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters

Point to rich ends.”

ADVANTAGES OF THE UNION.

On the advantages of the Union to Scotland Johnson was not easily tired of haranguing. Of the advantages to England he said nothing probably because he saw nothing. Yet it would not be easy to tell on which side the balance lay. Before the Union, he maintained, “the Scotch had hardly any trade, any money, or any elegance.”[211] In his Journey to the Western Islands he tells the Scotch that “they must be for ever content to owe to the English that elegance and culture which, if they had been vigilant and active, perhaps the English might have owed to them.”[212]

Smollett, who in national prejudice did not yield even to him, has strongly upheld the opposite opinion. In his History he describes Lord Belhaven’s speech against the Union in the last parliament which sat in Scotland—a speech “so pathetic that it drew tears from the audience. It is,” he adds, “at this day looked upon as a prophecy by great part of the Scottish nation.”[213] The towns on the Firth of Forth, he maintained, through the loss of the trade with France, had been falling to decay ever since the two countries were united.[214] In these views he was not supported by the two great writers who were his countrymen and his contemporaries. It was chiefly to the Union that Adam Smith attributed the great improvements in agriculture which had been made in the eighteenth century.[215] It was to the Union that Hume attributed the blessing “of a government perfectly regular, and exempt from all violence and injustice.”[216] Many years later Thomas Carlyle, in whom glowed the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum as it has glowed in few, owned that “the Union was one of Scotland’s chief blessings,” though it was due to Wallace and to men like him “that it was not the chief curse.”[217]

A DISPUTATIOUS PEASANTRY.

It must never be forgotten that in this Union England was no less blessed than Scotland; that if she gave wealth to Scotland, Scotland nobly repaid the gift in men. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English stock had been quickened and strengthened and ennobled by fugitives seeking refuge on her shores from the persecutions of priests and kings, which passed over the coward and the base, and fell only on the brave and the upright. To the Fleming and the Huguenot was now added the Scot. In philosophy, in history, in law, in science, in poetry, in romance, in the arts of life, in trade, in government, in war, in the spread of our dominions, in the consolidation of our Empire, glorious has been the part which Scotland has played. Her poet’s prayer has been answered, and in “bright succession” have been raised men to adorn and guard not only herself but the country which belongs to Englishmen and Scotchmen alike. Little of this was seen, still less foreseen by Johnson. The change which was going on in Scotland was rapid and conspicuous; the change which she was working outside her borders was slow, and as yet almost imperceptible. What was seen raised not admiration, but jealousy of the vigorous race which was everywhere so rapidly “making its way to employment, riches, and distinction.” That Johnson should exult in the good which Scotland had derived from England through the Union was natural. Scarcely less natural that he should point out how much remained to be done before the Scotch attained the English level, not only in the comforts and refinements, but even in the decencies of life. One great peculiarity in their civilization struck him deeply. “They had attained the liberal without the manual arts, and excelled in ornamental knowledge while they wanted the conveniences of common life.”[218] Even the peasantry were able to dispute with wonderful sagacity upon the articles of their faith, though they were content to live in huts which had not a single chimney to carry off the smoke.[219] Wesley, each time that he crossed the Borders, found a far harder task awaiting him than when he was upbraiding, denouncing, and exhorting an English congregation. To the Scotch, cradled as they had been in the Shorter Catechism, and trained as they were from their youth up in theology, his preaching, like Paul’s to the Greeks, was too often foolishness. He spoke to a people, as he complained, “who heard much, knew everything, and felt nothing.”[220] Though “you use the most cutting words still they hear, but feel no more than the seats they sit upon.”[221] Nowhere did he speak more roughly than in Scotland. No one there was offended at plain dealing. “In this respect they were a pattern to all mankind.” But yet “they hear and hear, and are just what they were before.”[222] He was fresh from the Kelso people and was preaching to a meeting in Northumberland when he wrote: “Oh! what a difference is there between these living stones, and the dead unfeeling multitudes in Scotland.”[223] “The misfortune of a Scotch congregation,” he recorded on another occasion, “is they know everything; so they learn nothing.”[224]

With their disputatious learning the meagreness of their fare and the squalor of their dwellings but ill contrasted. “Dirty living,” said Smollett, “is the great and general reproach of the commonalty of this kingdom.”[225] While Scotland sent forth into the world year after year swarms of young men trained in thrift, well stored with knowledge, and full of energy and determination, the common people bore an ill-repute for industry. They were underfed, and under-feeding produced indolent work. “Flesh-meat they seldom or never tasted; nor any kind of strong liquor except two-penny at times of uncommon festivity.”[226] “Ale,” wrote Lord Kames, “makes no part of the maintenance of those in Scotland who live by the sweat of their brow. Water is their only drink.”[227] Adam Smith admitted that both in bodily strength and personal appearance they were below the English standard. “They neither work so well, nor look so well.”[228] Wolfe, when he returned to England from Scotland in 1753, said that he had not crossed the Border a mile when he saw the difference that was produced upon the face of the country by labour and industry. “The English are clean and laborious, and the Scotch excessively dirty and lazy.”[229]

POVERTY OF THE COMMON PEOPLE.

This dirtiness would offend an Englishman more than a man of any other nation, for “high and low, rich and poor, they were remarkable for cleanness all the world over.”[230] Matthew Bramble, in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, notices the same change. “The boors of Northumberland,” he wrote, “are lusty fellows, fresh-complexioned, cleanly and well-clothed; but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled and shabby. The cattle are much in the same style with their drivers, meagre, stunted, and ill-equipt.”[231] Topham, in his Letters from Edinburgh, asserts the misery, but denies the idleness. Temperance and labour were, he says, in the extreme; nevertheless, on all sides were seen, “haggard looks, meagre complexions, and bodies weakened by fatigue and worn down by the inclemency of the seasons.” Neither were the poor of the capital any better off. Their wretchedness and poverty exceeded, he thought, what was to be found anywhere else in the whole world. But though as a nation the Scotch were very poor, yet they were very honest.[232] A traveller through the country in 1766 goes so far as to maintain that the common people in outward appearance would not at first be taken to be of the human species. Though their indigence was extreme, yet they would rather suffer poverty than labour. Their nastiness was greater than could be reported. Happily their rudeness was beginning to wear off, and in the trading towns where the knowledge of the use of money was making them eager enough to acquire it, they were already pretty well civilized and industrious.[233] Wages were miserably low. The Scotch labourer received little more than half what was paid to the Englishman; yet grain was dearer in Scotland than in England.[234] The historian of Edinburgh thus sums the general condition of the labouring poor:—

“The common people have no ideas of the comforts of life. The labourers and low mechanics live in a very wretched style. Their houses are the receptacles of nastiness, where the spider may in peace weave his web from generation to generation. A garden, where nothing is to be seen but a few plants of coleworts or potatoes, amidst an innumerable quantity of weeds, surrounds his house. A bit of flesh will not be within his door twice a year. He abhors industry, and has no relish for the comforts arising from it.”[235]

Lord Elibank’s famous reply to Johnson’s definition of oats had every merit but a foundation of fact. “Oats,” wrote Johnson, “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” “Very true,” replied his lordship, “and where will you find such men and such horses?”[236]

The natural result of this general poverty was seen in the number of beggars who thronged the streets and roads. Scotland was neither blessed with a good poor-law nor cursed with a bad one. The relief of want was left altogether to charity. In Edinburgh Johnson thought that the proportion of beggars was not less than in London. “In the smaller places it was far greater than in English towns of the same extent.” The mendicants were not, however, of the order of sturdy vagabonds. They were neither importunate nor clamorous. “They solicit silently, or very modestly.”[237] Smollett went so far as to maintain in his Humphry Clinker, which was published only two years before Johnson’s visit, that “there was not a beggar to be seen within the precincts of Edinburgh.”[238] For some years, indeed, the streets had been free of them, for a charity workhouse had been erected, to which they were all committed. But the magistrates had grown careless, and the evil had broken out afresh. “The streets are crowded with begging poor,” wrote one writer. “We see the whole stairs, streets, and public walks swarming with beggars every day,” wrote another.[239]

HOUSES AND MEALS.

The general neglect of the decencies of life was due chiefly to poverty, but partly, no doubt, to that violent outburst against all that is beautiful and graceful which accompanied the Reformation in Scotland. A nation which, as a protest against popery, “thought dirt and cob-webs essential to the house of God,”[240] was not likely in their homes to hold that cleanliness was next to godliness. The same coarseness of living had been found in all classes, though it was beginning to yield before English influence. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, in the year 1742, notices as a sign of increasing refinement, that at the tavern in Haddington, where the Presbytery dined, knives and forks were provided for the table. A few years earlier each guest had brought his own. There was, however, only one glass, which went round with the bottle.[241] The same custom had prevailed in Edinburgh when Lord Kames was a young man. French wine was placed on the table, he said, in a small tin vessel, which held about an English pint. A single drinking-glass served a company the whole evening, and the first persons who called for a new glass with every new pint were accused of luxury.[242] Boswell could remember the time when a carving knife was looked upon as a novelty. One of his friends was rated by his father, “a gentleman of ancient family and good literature, for introducing such a foppish superfluity.” In the previous generation whatever food was eaten with a spoon, such as soup, milk, or pudding, used to be taken by every person dipping his spoon into the common dish.[243] When an old laird was complimented on the accomplishments which his son had brought home from his travels, “he answered that he knew nothing he had learnt but to cast a sark (change a shirt) every day, and to sup his kail twice.”[244] Of the food that was served up, there was not much greater variety than of the dishes in which it was served. When Wesley first visited Scotland, even at a nobleman’s table, he had only one kind of meat, and no vegetables whatever. By the year 1788, however, vegetables were, he recorded, as plentiful as in England.[245] The butter in these early days made in country houses, “would have turned stomachs the least squeamish.” But by the introduction of tea a great improvement had been made. Bread and butter was taken with it, and a demand arose for butter that was sweet and clean. Wheaten bread, too, began to be generally eaten. So great a delicacy had it been, that the sixpenny loaf and the sugar used to be kept “locked up in the lady’s press.”[246] In the Highlands, at all events, there was a great variety as well as abundance of food. The following was the breakfast which in Argyleshire was set before the travellers in Humphry Clinker:—

“One kit of boiled eggs; a second full of butter; a third full of cream; an entire cheese made of goat’s milk; a large earthen pot full of honey; the best part of a ham; a cold venison pasty; a bushel of oatmeal made in thin cakes and bannocks, with a small wheaten loaf in the middle for the strangers; a large stone bottle full of whisky, another of brandy, and a kilderkin of ale. There was a ladle chained to the cream kit, with curious wooden bickers to be filled from this reservoir. The spirits were drunk out of a silver quaff, and the ale out of horns. Finally a large roll of tobacco was presented by way of desert, and every individual took a comfortable quid, to prevent the bad effects of the morning air.”[247]

Knox, in his Tour through the Highlands,[248] gives a still vaster bill of fare. The houses of the country gentlemen were for the most part small. “It was only on festivals or upon ceremonious occasions, that the dining-room was used. People lived mostly in the family bed-chamber, where friends and neighbours were received without scruple. Many an easy, comfortable meal,” writes Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, “had I made in that way.”[249] It was to this custom that the Scotch had of turning a bed-room into an eating-room that an English traveller refers, when he says that the Edinburgh taverns are the worst in the world, for “you sup underground in a bed-chamber.”[250] Even at the modern houses there was generally a total absence of an accommodation such as would not at the present day be tolerated in a labourer’s cottage by a sanitary inspector in any district in England.[251]

The state of the capital was far worse even than the state of the country. It was one of the last places in the world on which would have been bestowed that favourite and almost exalted epithet of praise—neat.[252] The houses, indeed, were solidly built, and the rooms of the well-to-do people were comfortable and clean, and often spacious. “Nothing could form a stronger contrast than the difference between the outside and the inside of the door.” Within all was decency and propriety, without was a filthy staircase leading down into a filthy street. Every story was a complete house, occupied by a separate family. The steep and dark staircase was common to all, and was kept clean by none. It was put to the basest uses.[253] The gentry did not commonly occupy the lowest stories or the highest. The following is the list of the inhabitants of a good house in the High Street:—

• “First door upstairs, Mr. Stirling, fishmonger.
• Second door, Mrs. Urquhart, who kept a lodging-house of good repute.
• Third flat, the Dowager Countess of Balcarras.
• Fourth flat, Mrs. Buchan, of Kelly.
• Fifth flat, the Misses Elliots, milliners.
• Garrets, a great variety of tailors and other tradesmen.”[254]

THE SCAVENGING OF EDINBURGH.

There were no water pipes, there were no drain pipes, there were no cess-pools, and there were no covered sewers in the streets. At a fixed hour of the night all the impurities were carried down the common staircase in tubs, and emptied into the street as into a common sewer, or else, in defiance of the law, cast out of the window. “Throwing over the window” was the delicate phrase in which this vile practice was veiled. It was “an obstinate disease which had withstood all the labour of the Magistrates, Acts of Council, Dean of Guild Courts for stencheling,[255] tirlesing,[256] and locking up windows, fines, imprisonments, and banishing the city.”[257] The servants were willing to serve for lower wages in houses where this practice was winked at. It gave rise to numerous quarrels which caused constables more trouble than any other part of their duty.[258] According to the account given by the English maid in Humphry Clinker, when “the throwing over” began, “they called gardy loo to the passengers, which signifies Lord have mercy upon you.”[259] A young English traveller, who, the first night of his arrival in Edinburgh, was enjoying his supper, as he tells us, and good bottle of claret with a merry company in a tavern, heard, as the clock was striking ten, the beat of the city drum, the signal for the scavenging to begin. The company at once began to fumigate the room by lighting pieces of paper and throwing them on the table. Tobacco smoking, it is clear, could not have been in fashion. As his way to his lodgings lay through one of the wynds he was provided “with a guide who went before him, crying out all the way, Hud your Haunde.”[260] The city scavengers cleansed the streets as fast as they could, and by opening reservoirs which were placed at intervals washed the pavement clean.[261]

To this intolerable nuisance the inhabitants generally seemed insensible, and were too apt to imagine the disgust of strangers as little better than affectation.[262] Yet it was not affectation which led John Wesley, in May, 1761, to make the following entry in his Journal:—

“The situation of the city on a hill shelving down on both sides, as well as to the east, with the stately castle upon a craggy rock on the west, is inexpressibly fine. And the main street so broad and finely paved, with the lofty houses on either hand (many of them seven or eight stories high) is far beyond any in Great Britain. But how can it be suffered that all manner of filth should still be thrown, even into this street, continually? Where are the Magistracy, the Gentry, the Nobility of the Land? Have they no concern for the honour of their nation? How long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea and the chief street of it, stink worse than a common sewer?”[263]

Ten years earlier he had described the town as dirtier even than Cologne. According to Wolfe, it was not till after Christmas, when the company had come into it from the country, that it was “in all its perfection of dirt and gaiety.”[264] Gray called it “that most picturesque (at a distance) and nastiest (when near) of all capital cities.”[265] “Pray for me till I see you,” he added, “for I dread Edinburgh and the —.”[266] To add to the insalubrity, the windows would not readily open. In Scotland they neither opened wide on hinges, nor were drawn up and down by weights and pulleys. For the most part the lower sash only could be raised; and when lifted, it was propped open by a stick or by a pin thrust into a hole.[267] “What cannot be done without some uncommon trouble or particular expedient will not often be done at all. The incommodiousness of the Scotch windows keeps them very closely shut.”[268] From this closeness Johnson suffered not a little, for he loved fresh air, “and on the coldest day or night would set open a window and stand before it,” as Boswell knew to his cost.[269] Topham, who sided with his Scotch friends against Johnson, scoffed at these observations on window-frames and pulleys. “Men of the world,” he wrote, “would not have descended to such remarks. A petty and frivolous detail of trifling circumstances are [sic] the certain signs of ignorance or inexperience.”[270] Johnson, in introducing the subject, had guarded himself against such reflections. “These diminutive observations,” he said, “seem to take away something from the dignity of writing. But it must be remembered that the true state of every nation is the state of common life.”[271] This indifference to pure air no doubt spread death far and wide. In Sir Walter Scott’s family we see an instance of the unwholesomeness of the Old Town. His six elder brothers and sisters, who were all born in the College Wynd, died young. It was only by sending him to breathe country air that he was reared. His father’s younger children were born in one of the new squares, and they for the most part were healthy.[272]

From one burthen that weighed heavily in England the guests in most houses in Scotland were free. It was the Scotch, who, as Boswell boasted, “had the honour of being the first to abolish the unhospitable, troublesome, and ungracious custom of giving vails to servants. ‘Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘you abolished vails, because you were too poor to be able to give them.’”[273] How heavily they weighed on all but the rich is shown by an anecdote that I have read somewhere of a poor gentleman, who refused to dine with his kinsman, a nobleman of high rank, unless with the invitation a guinea were sent him to distribute among the expectant servants, who, with outstretched hands, always thronged the hall and blocked up the doorway as he left. “I paid ten shillings to my host’s servants for my dinner and retired,” is the record of a man who had received the honour of an invitation to the house of an English nobleman of high rank.[274] Even Queen Caroline had complained of “the pretty large expense” to which she had been put in the summer of 1735 in visiting her friends, not at their country houses, but in town. “That is your own fault (said the King), for my father, when he went to people’s houses in town, never was fool enough to be giving away his money.”[275] It was to the gentlemen of the county of Aberdeen that was due the merit of beginning this great reformation. About the year 1759 they resolved at a public meeting that vails should be abolished and wages increased.[276] Early in February, 1760, the Select Society of Edinburgh, following their lead, passed a resolution to which their President, the historian Robertson, seems to have lent the graces of his style. They declared that “this custom, being unknown to other nations and a reproach upon the manners and police of this country, has a manifest tendency to corrupt the hospitality and to destroy all intercourse between families. They resolved that from and after the term of Whitsuntide next every member of the Society would absolutely prohibit his own servants to take vails or drink-money, and that he would not offer it to the servants of any person who had agreed to this resolution.”[277] Like resolutions followed from the Faculty of Advocates, the Society of Clerks to His Majesty’s Signet, the Heritors of Mid-Lothian headed by the Earl of Lauderdale, the Grand Lodge of Freemasons, headed by the Earl of Leven, and the Honourable Company of Scots Hunters headed by the President, the Earl of Errol.[278] The same good change was attempted a few years later in England, but apparently without success. The footmen, night after night, raised a riot at Ranelagh Gardens, and mobbed and ill-treated some gentlemen who had been active in the attempt. “There was fighting with drawn swords for some hours; they broke one chariot all to pieces. The ladies go into fits, scream, run into the gardens, and do everything that is ridiculous.”[279]

That “felicity” which England had in its taverns and inns was not equally enjoyed in Scotland. Certainly it was not in Edinburgh that was to be found “that throne of human felicity a tavern chair.”[280] Yet in the Lowlands generally the fare in the inns was good and the accommodation clean. Along both the eastern and the western roads John Wesley was well pleased with the entertainment with which he met. “We had all things good, cheap, in great abundance, and remarkably well dressed.”[281] In the Gentleman’s Magazine for December, 1771, a curious list is given of the inns and innkeepers in Scotland. According to this account the fare generally was good, while everywhere was found “excellent clean linen both for bed and board.” The traveller did well, however, who had his sheets toasted and his bed warmed, for the natives, used as they were to sleeping in their wet plaids, were careless about a damp bed. Goldsmith, on the other hand, spoke as ill of the Scotch inns as he did of the Scotch landscape. In them, he says, “vile entertainment is served up, complained of, and sent down; up comes worse, and that also is changed, and every change makes our wretched cheer more unsavoury.”[282] The scantiness of his purse, however, would have made him resort to the humblest houses, and probably his experience did not extend much outside of Edinburgh. Of the inns of that city, no one, whether native or stranger, had a good word to say. The accommodation that was provided, writes the historian of Edinburgh, “was little better than that of a waggoner or a carrier.”[283] “The inns are mean buildings,” he continues, “their apartments dirty and dismal; and if the waiters happen to be out of the way, a stranger will perhaps be shocked with the novelty of being shown into a room by a dirty sun-burnt wench without shoes or stockings. If he should desire furnished lodgings, he is probably conducted to the third or fourth floor, up dark and dirty stairs, and there shown into apartments meanly fitted up. The taverns in general are dirty and dismal as the inns; an idle profusion of victuals, collected without taste, and dressed without skill or cleanliness, is commonly served up. There are, however, exceptions, and a Scots tavern, if a good one, is the best of all taverns.”[284] Smollett, willing as he was to see the good side of everything in Scotland, yet represents the inn in Edinburgh at which Matthew Bramble alighted as being “so filthy and so disagreeable in every respect, that the old man began to fret.”[285] Perhaps it was the same house which is described by Topham in the following lively passage in his Letters:[286]

In the Edinburgh Directory for 1773-4, among the different trades, there is no entry under the heading of inn-keepers. There are vintners, who, I suppose, were also tavern-keepers, and stablers, who kept the inns. It was to this curious appellation that Topham referred when he said that the inn-keepers had the modesty to call themselves stable-keepers.

A few years after Johnson’s visit a good hotel was at last opened in the New Town. The accommodation was elegant, but the charges extravagant.[288] The French traveller, Saint Fond, who stayed in it about the year 1780, said that the house was magnificent and adorned with columns, as his bill was with flourishes and vignettes. Half a sheet of note-paper was charged threepence, with sixpence added for the trouble of fetching it. He paid twice as much for everything as in the best inn on the road from London. In all his journeyings through England and Scotland he was only twice charged exorbitantly—at Dunn’s Hotel in Edinburgh, and at the Bull’s Head in Manchester.[289]

Johnson, coming from Berwick by the coast-road, entered Edinburgh by the Canongate. It was on a dusky night in August that, arm in arm with Boswell, he walked up the High Street. “Its breadth and the loftiness of the buildings on each side made,” he acknowledged, “a noble appearance.”[290] In the light of the day he does not seem to have been equally impressed. “Most of the buildings are very mean,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale; “and the whole town bears some resemblance to the old part of Birmingham.”[291] In his Letters he does not touch on that appearance so unusual to Englishmen which, as we learn from his narrative, generally struck him in the ancient towns of Scotland.[292] Wesley’s attention was caught by this same “peculiar oddness” and “air of antiquity.” They were like no places that he had ever seen in England, Wales, or Ireland.[293] It was not, however, to Birmingham that that great traveller likened the famous High Street. There was nothing, he said, that could compare with it in Great Britain. Defoe’s admiration had risen still higher. In his eyes it ranked as almost the largest, longest, and finest street in the world. Its solidity of stone he contrasted with the slightness of the houses in the South. Lofty though the buildings were, placed, too, on “the narrow ridge of a long ascending mountain,” with storms often raging round them, “there was no blowing of tiles about the streets to knock people on the heads as they passed; no stacks of chimneys and gable-ends of houses falling in to bury the inhabitants in their ruins, as was often found in London and other of our paper-built cities in England.”[294] “The High Street is the stateliest street in the world,” said another writer; “being broad enough for five coaches to drive up a-breast, while the houses are proportionately high.”[295] According to Topham it surpassed “the famous street in Lisle, La Rue Royale.”[296] “It would be undoubtedly one of the noblest streets in Europe,” wrote Smollett, “if an ugly mass of mean buildings, called the Luckenbooths, had not thrust itself into the middle of the way.”[297] Pennant had the same tale to tell. “As fine a street as most in Europe, was spoilt by the Luckenbooth Row and the Guard House.”[298] Carlyle, when he came to Edinburgh as a boy-student, in the year 1809, had seen “the Luckenbooths, with their strange little ins and outs, and eager old women in miniature shops of combs, shoe-laces, and trifles.”[299] One venerable monument had been wantonly removed, while so much that was mean and ugly was left to encumber the street. In 1756 those “dull destroyers,” the magistrates, had pulled down “Dun-Edin’s Cross.”[300] From the bottom of the hill “by the very Palace door,” up to the gates of the Castle the High Street, even so late as Johnson’s time, was the home of men of rank, of wealth, and of learning. It did not bear that look of sullen neglect which chills the stranger who recalls its past glories. The craftsmen and the nobles, the poor clerks and the wealthy merchants, judges, shopkeepers, labourers, authors, physicians, and lawyers, lived all side by side, so that “the tide of existence” which swept up and down was as varied as it was full. The coldness of the grey stone of the tall houses was relieved by the fantastic devices in red or yellow or blue on a ground of black, by which each trader signified the commodities in which he dealt. As each story was a separate abode, there were often seen painted on the front of one tall house half-a-dozen different signs. Here was a quartern loaf over a full-trimmed periwig, and there a Cheshire cheese or a rich firkin of butter over stays and petticoats.[301] To the north, scarcely broken as yet by the scattered buildings of the infant New Town, the outlook commanded that “incomparable prospect” which delighted Colonel Mannering, as he gazed from the window of Counsellor Pleydell’s library on “the Frith of Forth with its islands; the embayment which is terminated by the Law of North Berwick, and the varied shores of Fife, indenting with a hilly outline the clear blue horizon.”[302]

Every Sunday during the hours of service the streets were silent and solitary, as if a plague had laid waste the city. But in a moment the scene was changed. The multitude that poured forth from each church swept everything before it. The stranger who attempted to face it was driven from side to side by the advancing flood. The faithful were so intently meditating on the good things which they had just heard that they had no time to look before them. With their large prayer-books under their arms, their eyes fixed steadily on the ground, and wrapped up in their plaid cloaks, they went on regardless of everything that passed.[303]

Less than thirty years before Johnson, on that August night, “went up streets,”[304] the young Pretender, surrounded by his Highlanders, and preceded by his heralds and trumpeters, had marched from the Palace of his ancestors to the ancient Market Cross, and there had had his father proclaimed King by the title of James the Seventh of Scotland and Third of England. Down the same street in the following Spring his own standard, with its proud motto of Tandem Triumphans, and the banners of thirteen of his chief captains, in like manner preceded by heralds and trumpeters, had been borne on the shoulders of the common hangman and thirteen chimney-sweepers, to the same Cross, and there publicly burnt.[305] Here, too, was seen from time to time the sad and terrible procession, when, from the Tolbooth, some unhappy wretch was led forth to die in the Grass Market. As the clock struck the hour after noon, the City Guard knocked at the prison door. The convict at once came out, dressed in a waistcoat and breeches of white, bound with black ribands, and wearing a night-cap, also bound with black. His hands were tied behind him, and a rope was round his neck. On each side of him walked a clergyman, the hangman followed bemuffled in a great coat, while all around, with their arms ready, marched the Town Guard. Every window in every floor of every house was crowded with spectators.[306] Happily the criminal law of Scotland was far less bloody than that which at this time disgraced England, and executions, except for murder, were rare.[307] There was also much less crime. While the streets and neighbourhood of London were beset by footpads and highwaymen, in Edinburgh a man might go about with the same security at midnight as at noonday. Street robberies were very rare, and a street murder was, it is said, a thing unknown. This general safety was due partly to the Town Guard,[308] partly also to the Society of Cadies, or Cawdies, a fraternity of errand-runners. Each member had to find surety for good behaviour, and the whole body was answerable for the dishonesty of each. Their chief place of stand was at the top of the High Street, where some of them were found all the day and most of the night. They were said to be acquainted with every person and every place in Edinburgh. No stranger arrived but they knew of it at once. They acted as a kind of police, and were as useful as Sir John Fielding’s thief-takers in London.[309] In spite of these safeguards, in the autumn before Johnson’s visit there was an outbreak of crime. A reward of one guinea each was offered for the arrest of forty persons who had been banished the city, and who were suspected of having returned.[310] The worthy Magistrates, it should seem, were like Dogberry, and did not trouble themselves about a thief so long as he stole out of their company.

The Edinburgh Tolbooth and the other Scotch gaols were worse even than those cruel dens in which the miserable prisoners were confined in England. They had no court-yard where the fresh air of heaven might be breathed for some hours at least of every weary day. Not even to the unhappy debtor was any indulgence shown. That air was denied to him which was common to all. Even under a guard, said an expounder of the law, he had no right to the benefit of free air; “for every creditor has an interest that his debtor be kept under close confinement, that by his squalor carceris he may be brought to the payment of his just debt.”[311] He was to learn the fulness of the meaning of “the curse of a severe creditor who pronounces his debtor’s doom, To Rot in Gaol.”[312] At the present time even in Siberia there cannot, I believe, be found so cruel a den as that old Edinburgh Tolbooth, by whose gloomy walls Johnson passed on his way to Boswell’s comfortable home close by, where Mrs. Boswell and tea were awaiting him. In one room were found by a writer who visited the prison three lads confined among “the refuse of a long succession of criminals.” The straw which was their bed had been worn into bits two inches long. In a room on the floor above were two miserable boys not twelve years old. But the stench that assailed him as the door was opened so overpowered him that he fled. The accumulation of dirt which he saw in the rooms and on the staircases was so great, that it set him speculating in vain on the length of time which must have been required to make it. The supply of the food and drink was the jailer’s monopoly; whenever the poor wretches received a little money from friends outside, or from charity, they were not allowed the benefit of the market price. The choice of the debtor’s prison was left to the caprice of his creditor, and that which was known to be the most loathsome was often selected.[313] The summer after Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh John Wesley, in one of the streets of that town, was suddenly arrested by a sheriff’s officer on a warrant to commit him to the Tolbooth. Happily he was first taken to an adjoining building—some kind of spunging-house, it is probable—whence he sent word to his friends, and obtained bail. The charge brought against him was ridiculous, and in the end the prosecutor had heavy damages to pay.[314] Nevertheless, monstrous though the accusation was, had Wesley been not only a stranger and poor, but also friendless, it was in that miserable den that he would have been lodged. His deliverance might have been by gaol-fever.

Boswell himself, if we may trust the tradition, little more than four years before he welcomed Johnson, had run a risk of becoming acquainted with the inside of that prison. Scotland was all ablaze with the great Douglas cause. The succession to the large estates of the last Duke of Douglas was in dispute; so eagerly did men share in the shifting course of the long lawsuit, that it was scarcely safe to open the lips about it in mixed company. Boswell, with all the warmth of his eager nature, took the part of the heir whose legitimacy was disallowed by the casting vote of the President in the Court of Session. The case was carried on appeal to the House of Lords, and on Monday, February 27, 1769, the Scotch decision was reversed. A little before eight o’clock on Thursday evening the news reached Edinburgh by express. The city was at once illuminated, and the windows of the hostile judges were broken. Boswell, it is said, headed the mob. That his own father’s house was among those which he and his followers attacked, as Sir Walter Scott had heard,[315] is very unlikely: Lord Auchinleck had voted in the minority, and so would have been in high favour with the rioters. A party of foot soldiers was marched into the city, a reward of fifty pounds was offered for the discovery of the offenders, and for some nights the streets were patrolled by two troops of dragoons.[316] “Boswell’s good father,” writes Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “entreated the President with tears in his eyes to put his son in the Tolbooth. Being brought before Sheriff Cockburn for examination, he was desired to tell all that happened that night in his own way. ‘After,’ said he, ‘I had communicated the glorious news to my father, who received it very coolly, I went to the Cross to see what was going on. There I overheard a group of fellows forming their plan of operations. One of them asked what sort of a man the sheriff was, and whether he was not to be dreaded. ‘No, no,’ answered another; ‘he is a puppy of the President’s making.’ On hearing this exordium Mr. Cockburn went off, leaving the culprit to himself.”[317]

Among the sights which Johnson was shown at Edinburgh, the New Town was not included. Yet some progress had been made in laying out those streets, “which in simplicity and manliness of style and general breadth and brightness of effect” were destined to surpass anything that has been attempted in modern street architecture.[318] From Boswell’s windows, over the tops of the stately elm-trees which at that time ran in front of James’s Court and across a deep and marshy hollow, the rising houses could be easily seen. Full in view among the rest was the new home Hume had lately built for himself at the top of a street which was as yet unnamed, but was soon, as St. David’s, to commemorate in a jest the great philosopher who was its first inhabitant. Had the change which was so rapidly coming over Auld Reekie been understood in its full extent, surely Johnson’s attention would have been drawn to it. Boswell only mentions the New Town to introduce the name of “the ingenious architect” who planned it, Craig, the nephew of the poet Thomson.[319] His mind, perhaps, was so set on escaping from “the too narrow sphere of Scotland,” and on removing to London, that of Edinburgh and its fortunes he was careless. Yet, shrewd observer as he was of men and manners, he must have noticed how the tide of fashion had already begun to set from the Old Town, and was threatening to leave the ancient homes of the noble and the wealthy like so many wrecks behind. In many people there was a great reluctance to make a move. To some the old familiar life in a flat was dear, and the New Town was built after the English fashion, in what was known as “houses to themselves.” “One old lady fancied she should be lost if she were to get into such an habitation; another feared being blown away in going over the New Bridge; while a third thought that these new fashions could come to nae gude.”[320] Nevertheless, in spite of all these terrors, the change came very swiftly. So early as 1783, “a rouping-wife, or saleswoman of old furniture,” occupied the house which not many years before had been Lord President Craigie’s, while a chairman who had taken Lord Drummore’s house had “lately left it for want of accommodation.”[321] There were men of position, however, who, fashion or no fashion, clung to their old homes for many years later. Queensberry House, nearly at the foot of the Canongate, which in later years was turned into a Refuge for the Destitute, so late as 1803 was inhabited by the Lord Chief Baron Montgomery. Lord Cockburn remembered well the old judge’s tall, well-dressed figure in the old style, and the brilliant company which gathered round him in that ancient but decayed quarter.[322]

It was full five years before Johnson’s arrival that Dr. Robertson, pleading the cause of his poverty-stricken University, pointed out how the large buildings that were rising suddenly on all sides, the magnificent bridge that had been begun, and the new streets and squares all bore the marks of a country growing in arts and in industry.[323] It was in 1765 that the foundations were laid of the bridge which was to cross the valley that separates the Old and New Town. It was not till 1772 that “it was made passable.”[324] In 1783 the huge mound was begun which now so conveniently joins the two hills. The earth of which it is formed was dug out in making the foundations of the new houses. Fifteen hundred cartloads on an average were thrown in daily for the space of three years.[325] The valley, which with its lawns, its slopes, its trim walls, its beds of flowers, and its trees, adds so much to the pleasantness and beauty of Edinburgh, was when Johnson looked down into it “a deep morass, one of the dirtiest puddles upon earth.”[326] It was in its black mud that Hume one day stuck when he had slipped off the stepping-stones on the way to his new house. A fishwife, who was following after him, recognizing “the Deist,” refused to help him unless he should recite first the Lord’s Prayer and the Belief.[327] This he at once did to her great wonder. His admiration for the New Town was unbounded. If the High Street was finer than anything of its kind in Europe the New Town, he maintained, exceeded anything in any part of the world.[328] “You would not wonder that I have abjured London for ever,” he wrote to his friend, Strahan, in the year 1772, “if you saw my new house and situation in St. Andrew’s Square.”[329] Adam Smith told Rogers the poet, who visited Edinburgh in 1789, that the Old Town had given Scotland a bad name, and that he was anxious to move with the rest.[330]

The age which I am attempting to describe was looked upon by Lord Cockburn as “the last purely Scotch age that Scotland was destined to see. The whole country had not begun to be absorbed in the ocean of London.”[331] The distance between the two capitals as measured by time, fatigue, and money was little less than the distance in the present day between Liverpool and New York. Johnson, who travelled in post-chaises, and therefore in great comfort, was nine days on the road. “He purposed,” he wrote, “not to loiter much by the way;”[332] but he did not journey by night, and he indulged in two days’ rest at Newcastle. Hume, three years later, travelling by easy stages on account of his failing health, took two days longer.[333] Had Johnson gone by the public conveyance, the “Newcastle Fly” would have brought him in three days as far as that town at a charge of £3 6s. On the panels of the “Fly” was painted the motto, Sat cito si sat bene. Thence he would have continued his journey by the “Edinburgh Fly,” which traversed the whole remaining distance in a single day in summer, and in a day and a half in winter. The charge for this was £1 11s. 6d. In these sums were not included the payments to the drivers and guards. The “Newcastle Fly” ran six times a week, starting from London an hour after midnight. The “Edinburgh Fly” ran only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. A traveller then who lost no time on the road, leaving London at one o’clock on Sunday night, would in the summer-time reach Edinburgh by Thursday evening, and in the winter after mid-day on Friday.[334] Even the mail which was carried on horse-back, and went five times a week, took in good weather about 82 hours.[335] The news of the battle of Culloden, though it was forwarded by an express, was seven days all but two or three hours in reaching London.[336] There were men living in 1824 who recollected when the mail came down with only one single letter for Edinburgh.[337] By 1793 a great acceleration had been effected in the coach-service. It was possible, so the proud boast ran, to leave Edinburgh after morning service on Sunday, spend a whole day in London, and be back again by six o’clock on Saturday morning.[338] The weary traveller would have had to pass every night in the coach. By the year 1800 the journey was done from London to Edinburgh in fifty-eight hours, and from Edinburgh to London in sixty and a half.[339] But such annihilation of time and space, as no doubt this rapid rate of travelling was then called, was not dreamed of in Johnson’s day. The capitals of England and Scotland still stood widely apart. It was wholly “a Scotch scene” which the English traveller saw, and “independent tastes and ideas and pursuits” caught his attention.[340] Nevertheless in one respect Edinburgh, as I have already said, felt strongly the influence of England. In its literature and its language it was laboriously forming itself on the English model. There had been a long period during which neither learning nor literature had shone in Scotland with any brightness of light. Since the days of the great classical scholars not a single famous author had been seen. There had been “farthing candles” from time to time, but no “northern lights.”[341] The two countries were under the same sovereign, but there was no Age of Queen Anne north of the Tweed. There was indeed that general diffusion of learning which was conspicuously wanting in England. An English traveller noticed with surprise how rare it was to find “a man of any rank but the lowest who had not some tincture of learning. It was the pride and delight of every father to give his son a liberal education.”[342] Nevertheless it had been “with their learning as with provisions in a besieged town, every man had a mouthful and no one a bellyful.”[343] That there was a foundation for Johnson’s pointed saying was many years later candidly admitted by Sir Walter Scott.[344] So great had been the dearth of literature that the printer’s art had fallen into decay. About the year 1740 there were but four printing-houses in Edinburgh, which found scanty employment in producing school-books, law-papers, newspapers, sermons, and Bibles. By 1779 the number had risen from four to seven and twenty.[345] This rapid growth was by no means wholly due to an increase in Scotch authors. Edinburgh might have become “a hot-bed of genius,” but such productiveness even in a hot-bed would have been unparalleled. The booksellers in late years, in defiance of the supposed law of copyright, had begun to reprint the works of standard English writers, and after a long litigation had been confirmed in what they were doing by a decision given in the House of Lords.[346]

The growth of literature in Scotland had taken a turn which was not unnatural. In the troubles of the seventeenth century the nation, while yet it was in its power, had neglected to refine its language. No great masters of style had risen. There had been no Sir William Temple “to give cadence to its prose.”[347] The settled government and the freedom from tyranny which the country enjoyed on the fall of the Stuarts, the growth of material wealth which followed on the Union, the gradual diminution of bigotry and the scattering of darkness which was part of the general enlightenment of Europe had given birth to a love of modern literature. The old classical learning no longer sufficed. Having no literature of their own which satisfied their aspirations, the younger generation of men was forced to acquire the language of their ancient rivals, brought as it had been by a long succession of illustrious authors to a high degree of perfection.[348] It was to the volumes of Addison that the Scotch student was henceforth to give his days and nights. To read English was an art soon acquired, but to write it, and still more to speak it correctly, demanded a long and laborious study. Very few, with all their perseverance, succeeded like Mallet in “clearing their tongues from their native pronunciation.”[349] Even to understand the language when spoken was only got by practice. A young lady from the country, who was reproached with having seen on the Edinburgh stage some loose play, artlessly replied:—“Indeed they did nothing wrong that I saw; and as for what they said, it was high English, and I did not understand it.”[350] Dr. Beattie studied English from books like a dead language. To write it correctly cost him years of labour.[351] “The conversation of the Edinburgh authors,” said Topham, “showed that they wrote English as a foreign tongue,” for their spoken language was so unlike their written.[352] Some men were as careless of their accent as they were careful of their words. Hume’s tone was always broad Scotch, but Scotch words he carefully avoided.[353] Others indulged in two styles and two accents, one for familiar life, the other for the pulpit, the court of Session, or the professor’s chair. In all this there was a great and a strange variety. Lord Kames, for instance, in his social hour spoke pure Scotch, though “with a tone not displeasing from its vulgarity;” on the Bench his language approached to English.[354] His brother judge, Lord Auchinleck, on the other hand, clung to his mother tongue. He would not smooth or round his periods, or give up his broad Scotch, however vulgar it was accounted. The sturdy old fellow felt, no doubt, a contempt for that “compound of affectation and pomposity” which some of his countrymen spoke—a language which “no Englishman could understand.”[355] In their attempt to get rid of their accent they too often arrived at the young lady’s High English, a mode of speaking far enough removed no doubt from the Scotch, but such as “made ‘the fools who used it’ truly ridiculous.”[356] There were others who were far more successful. “The conversation of the Scots,” wrote Johnson, “grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustic, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation; and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.”[357] The old lady whom he chiefly had in his memory when he wrote this was probably the Duchess of Douglas. He had met her at Boswell’s table. “She talks broad Scotch with a paralytick voice,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “and is scarce understood by her own countrymen.”[358] Boswell himself, by the instruction of a player from Drury Lane, who had brought a company to Edinburgh, succeeded so well in clearing his tongue of his Scotch that Johnson complimented him by saying: “Sir, your pronunciation is not offensive.”[359]

In their pursuit of English literature the Scotch proved as successful as in everything else which they took in hand. Whatever ill-will may have existed between the two nations, there was no grudging admiration shown in England for their authors. In popularity few writers of their time surpassed Thomson, Smollett, Hume, Robertson, John Home, Macpherson, Hugh Blair, Beattie, and Boswell; neither had Robert Blair, Mallet, Kames, John Dalrymple, Henry Mackenzie, Monboddo, Adam Ferguson, and Watson, any reason to complain of neglect. If Adam Smith and Reid were not so popular as some of their contemporaries it was because they had written for the small class of thinkers; though the Wealth of Nations, which was published little more than two years after Johnson’s visit, was by the end of the century to reach its ninth edition. “This, I believe, is the historical age, and this the historical nation,” Hume wrote proudly from Edinburgh.[360] He boasted that “the copy-money” given him for his History “much exceeded anything formerly known in England.” It made him “not only independent but opulent.” Robertson for his Charles V. received £3,400, and £400 was to be added on the publication of the second edition.[361] Blair for a single volume of his Sermons was paid £600.[362]

Whatever ardour Scotchmen showed for English literature as men of letters, yet they never for one moment forgot their pride in their own country. In a famous club they had banded themselves together for the sake of doing away with a reproach which had been cast upon their nation. Just as down to the present time no Parliament has ventured to trust Ireland with a single regiment of volunteers, so Scotland one hundred years ago was not trusted with a militia. In the words of Burns,

In 1759 a Bill for establishing this force had been brought into Parliament, and though Pitt acquiesced in the measure, it was thrown out by “the young Whigs.” Most Englishmen probably felt with Horace Walpole, when he rejoiced that “the disaffected in Scotland could not obtain this mode of having their arms restored.”[364] Two or three years later the literary men in Edinburgh, affronted by this refusal, formed themselves into a league of patriots. The name of The Militia Club, which they had at first thought of adopting, was rejected as too directly offensive. With a happy allusion to the part which they were to play in stirring up the fire and spirit of the country, they decided on calling themselves “The Poker.” Andrew Crosbie, the original of Mr. Counsellor Pleydell, was humorously elected Assassin, and David Hume was added as his Assessor, “without whose assent nothing should be done.”[365] It was urged with great force that Scotland was as much exposed as England to plunder and invasion. Why, it was asked, was she refused a militia when one had been granted to Cumberland and Westmoreland, and Lancashire? Had not those countries contributed more adventurers to the forces of the Young Pretender than all the Lowlands? “Why put a sword in the hands of foreigners for wounding the Scottish nation and name? A name admired at home for fidelity, regaled [sic] in every clime for strictness of discipline, and dreaded for intrepidity.”[366] In 1776 the Bill was a second time brought in, but was a second time rejected. “I am glad,” said Johnson, “that the Parliament has had the spirit to throw it out.”[367] By this time it was not timidity only which caused the rejection. The English were touched in their pockets. It was maintained that as Scotland contributed so little to the land-tax, so if she needed a militia she ought to bear the whole expense herself. “What enemy,” asked Johnson scornfully, “would invade Scotland where there is nothing to be got?”[368] It was not till the year 1793, in the midst of the alarms of a war with France, that the force was at last established, and Scotland in one more respect placed on an equality with England.

In Edinburgh such a club as this, formed of all the eager active spirits in the place, could act with the greater vigour from the ease with which the members could meet. In whatever quarter of the town men lived, even if they had moved to the squares which had lately been built to the north and south, they were not much more widely separated than the residents in the Colleges of Oxford. The narrowness of the limits in which they were confined is shown by the small number of hackney-coaches which served their wants. In London, in 1761, there were eight hundred; by 1784 they had risen to a thousand.[369] In Edinburgh there were but nine; and even these, it was complained, were rarely to be seen on the stand after three o’clock in the afternoon. It was in sedan chairs that visits of ceremony were paid; the bearers were Highlanders, as in London they were generally Irishmen.[370] The dinner-hour was still so early that the meal of careless and cheerful hospitality was the supper. In 1763 fashionable people dined at two; twenty years later at four or even at five.[371] At the time of Johnson’s visit three was probably the common hour. Dr. Carlyle describes the ease with which in his younger days a pleasant supper party was gathered together. “We dined where we best could, and by cadies[372] we assembled our friends to meet us in a tavern by nine o’clock; and a fine time it was when we could collect David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Elibank, and Drs. Blair and Jardine on an hour’s warning.”[373] Though the Scotch were “religious observers of hospitality,”[374] yet a stranger did not readily get invited to their favourite meal. “To be admitted to their suppers is a mark of their friendship. At them the restraints of ceremony are banished, and you see people really as they are.” The Scotch ladies, it was noticed, at these cheerful but prolonged repasts drank more wine than an English woman could well bear, “but the climate required it.”[375] The “patriotic Knox” describes the inhabitants of Edinburgh as being “not only courteous, obliging, open, and hospitable, but well-inclined to the bottle.” It was not to the climate that he attributed this joyous devotion, but “to their social dispositions and the excellence of their wines.”[376] Boswell has left us a description of a supper which he enjoyed at Hume’s new house in St. Andrew’s Square. He had Dr. Robertson and Lord Kames for his fellow-guests, and three sorts of ice-creams among the dishes. “What think you of the northern Epicurus style?” he asked. He complained, however, that he could recollect no conversation. “Our writers here are really not prompt on all occasions as those of London.”[377] He had been spoilt by the talk in the taverns of Fleet Street and the Turk’s Head Club, and was discontented because he did not find in St. Andrew’s Square a Johnson, a Burke, a Wilkes, and a Beauclerk.

Into Hume’s pleasant house Johnson unhappily never entered.[378] He even thought that his friend Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke College, had done wrong when he had met by invitation “that infidel writer” at dinner, and “had treated him with smooth civility.”[379] Yet a man who could yield to the temptation of the talk of Jack Wilkes had no right to stand aloof from David Hume. We should like to know what he would have thought of that philosopher’s soupe À la reine made from a receipt which he had copied in his own neat hand, or of his “beef and cabbage (a charming dish) and old mutton and old claret, in which,” he boasted, “no man excelled him.” Perhaps, however, if Johnson could have been persuaded to taste the claret, old as it was, he would have shaken his head over it and called it “poor stuff.”[380] The sheep-head broth he would certainly have refused, though one Mr. Keith did speak of it for eight days after,[381] and the Duke de Nivernois would have bound himself apprentice to Hume’s lass to learn it.[382] “The stye of that fattest of Epicurus’s hogs” he failed to visit. “You tell me,” wrote the great Gibbon to a friend who was at Edinburgh just at the time of Johnson’s arrival, “you tell me of a long list of Dukes, Lords, and Chieftains of renown to whom you are introduced; were I with you I should prefer one David to them all.”[383] Boswell could easily have brought the two men together, intimate as he was with both. Early in his life he was able to boast that one of them had visited him in the forenoon and the other in the afternoon of the same day.[384] Hume’s conversation perhaps was not after the fashion which Johnson liked. It certainly would not have come recommended to him by his broad Scotch accent. Nevertheless there was that about it which endeared it to his friends. For innocent mirth and agreeable raillery he was thought to be unmatched.[385] Adam Smith has celebrated his constant pleasantry. In his wit there was not the slightest tincture of malignity.[386] But Johnson would have nothing to do with him.[387] In Boswell’s house in James’s Court, that Sunday he spent there in Dr. Robertson’s company, he said “something much too rough both as to Mr. Hume’s head and heart,” which Boswell thought well to suppress. In the quiet stillness of that summer sabbath day in Edinburgh, the strong loud voice might almost have been carried across the narrow valley to St. Andrew’s Square, and startled the philosopher in his retirement.

Neither did Johnson see Adam Smith, who in Hume’s house had his room whenever he chose to occupy it. To meet a famous stranger he would, we may well believe, have willingly crossed the Firth from his house in Kirkaldy. But the two men had once met in London, and “we did not take to each other,” said Johnson. Had he been more tolerant, and sought the society of these two great Scotchmen, he would have seen in Scotland the best which Scotland had to show. Even as it was, in his visit to the capital and the seats of the other universities, in his tour through Lowlands, Highlands and Isles, he saw perhaps as great a variety of men and manners as had been seen in that country by any Englishman up to his time.