e mome phist ti ation f owned ntions Liberate He loves rond of IT. grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of that evil, which, it was formerly imagined, the royal touch could cure. He was now in his sixty-fourth year, and was becoming a little dull of hearing. His sight had always been somewhat weak; yet, so much does mind govern, and even supply the deficiency of organs, that his perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy: he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions,' of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance. He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair-buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon his tour, when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio Dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars: every thing relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes instead of buckles. When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club; and, by-and-by, my readers will find this stick will bud, and produce a good joke. وو This imperfect sketch of "the combination and the form of that wonderful man, whom I venerated and 1 Such they appeared to me; but, since the first edition, Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed to me, that "Dr. Johnson's extraordinary gestures were only habits, in which he indulged himself at certain times. When in company, where he was not free, or when engaged earnestly in conversation, he never gave way to such habits, which proves that they were not involuntary." I still, however, think that these gestures were involuntary; for surely, had not that been the case, he would have restrained them in the public streets. 2 A few days before his death, Adam Smith ordered all his manuscripts, except some detached essays, to be burnt. The lectures on Rhetoric, which Boswell says he heard at Glasgow, and which Dugald Stewart speaks of as delivered at Edinburgh in the year 1748, were probably among those which were thus consumed. Life, by Dugald Stewart, appended to Smith's Works.-Works, vol. v., p. 512.-Editor. loved while in this world, and after whom I gaze with humble hope, now that it has pleased Almighty God to call him to a better world, will serve to introduce to the fancy of my readers the capital object of the following journal, in the course of which I trust they will attain to a considerable degree of acquaintance with him. His prejudice against Scotland was announced almost as soon as he began to appear in the world of letters. In his "London," a poem, are the following nervous lines: "For who could leave, unbribed, Hibernia's land? The truth is, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, he allowed himself to look upon all nations but his own as barbarians: not only Hibernia and Scotland, but Spain, Italy, and France, are attacked in the same poem. If he was particularly prejudiced against the Scots, it was because they were more in his way; because he thought their success in England rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit; and because he could not but see in them that nationality which I believe no liberal-minded Scotsman will deny. He was, indeed, if I may be allowed the phrase, at bottom much of a John Bull: much of a blunt trueborn Englishman. There was a stratum of common clay under the rock of marble. He was voraciously fond of good eating; and he had a great deal of that quality called humour, which gives an oiliness and a gloss to every other quality. I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love " every kindred and tongue and people and nation.' I subscribe to what my late truly learned and philosophical friend Mr. Crosbie said, that 1 Mr. Crosbie, one of the most eminent advocates then at the Scotch bar. Lord Stowell recollects that Johnson was treated by the Scottish literati with a degree of deference bordering on pusillanimity; but he excepts from that observation Mr. Crosbie, whom he characterises as an intrepid talker, and the only man who was disposed to stand up (as the phrase is) to Johnson.-Croker. graze tr God ace to fall! ttain t the English are better animals than the Scots; they are nearer the sun; their blood is richer, and more mellow: but when I humour any of them in an outrageous contempt of Scotland, I fairly own I treat them as children. And thus I have, at some moments, found myself obliged to treat even Dr. Johnson. To Scotland, however, he ventured: and he returned from it in great good humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated; as is evident from that admirable work, his "Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland," which, to my utter astonishment, has been misapprehended, even to rancour, by many of my countrymen. To have the company of Chambers and Scott, he delayed his journey so long, that the court of session, which rises on the 11th of August, was broke up before he got to Edinburgh. On Saturday, the 14th of August, 1773, late in the evening, I received a note from him, that he was arrived at Boyd's inn,' at the head of the Canongate. "Saturday night. "Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd's." I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially; and I exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia. Mr. Scott's amiable manners, and attachment to our Socrates, at once united me to him. He told me that, before I came in, the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, The sign of the White Horse. It continued a place from which coaches used to start till the end of the eighteenth century; some twelve or fifteen years ago it was a carrier's inn, and has since been held unworthy even of that occupation, and the sign is taken down. It was a base hovel. Walter Scott. It was the best of the only three inns in Edinburgh, where, at that time, people of any condition could be accommodated. The room in which Johnson had sat used to be pointed out by its later occupants.Chambers. lifted a lump of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of the window. Scott said he was afraid he would have knocked the waiter down.1 Mr. Johnson told me that such another trick was played him at the house of a lady in Paris. He was to do me the honour to lodge under my roof. I regretted sincerely that I had not also a room for Mr. Scott. Mr. Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm, up the High Street, to my house in James's Court; it was a dusky night: I could not pre 2 1 The house," said Lord Stowell to me, was kept by a woman, and she was called Luckie, which it seems is synonymous to Goody in England. I, at first, thought the appellation very inappropriate, and that Unlucky would have been better, for Dr. Johnson had a mind to have thrown the waiter, as well as the lemonade, out of the window." -Croker. 2 The house had been Hume's, and Boswell was now his tenant. In a letter, dated May 17, 1762, from Hume to Andrew Millar the publisher, Hume writes to him, "I remove my house this week to James's Court." There he remained till the spring of 1770, when he seems to have moved to the house which he had built in the New Town of Edinburgh, at the south-west corner of the street leading southward from St. Andrew Square, now called St. David Street. During Hume's absence in France, Hugh Blair, D.D., occupied the house in James's Court, which was thus the home successively of three very eminent men, Hume, Blair, and Boswell. The site of this house has been picturesquely described by Mr. Hill Burton in his Life of David Hume, vol. ii. p. 136. "Entering a low gateway, which pierces the line of lofty houses along the Lawn market, one finds oneself in a square court, surrounded by houses which have now evidently fallen to the lot of humbler inhabitants than those for whom they were erected. . . . Entering one of the doors opposite the main entrance, the stranger is sometimes led by a friend, wishing to afford him an agreeable surprise, down flight after flight of the steps a stone staircase, and when he imagines he is descending so far into the bowels of the earth, he emerges on the edge of a cheerful crowded thoroughfare, connecting together the Old and New Town, the latter of which lies spread before him, a contrast to the gloom from which he has emerged. When he looks up to the building containing the upright street through which he has descended, he sees that vast pile of tall houses, standing at the head of the mound, which creates astonishment in every visitor of Edinburgh. This vast fabric is built on the declivity of a hill, and thus one entering on the level of the Lawn market is at the height of several stories from the ground on the side next the New Town. I have ascertained that by ascending the western of the two stairs facing the entry of James's Court to the height of three stories, we arrive at the door of David Hume's house, which of the two doors on that landing-place is the one towards the left. The court on the north side was burnt down in 1858, and the site is now occupied by the Free Church offices." See Burton's Life of Hume, vol. ii. p. 136 and ... of vent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edin- My wife had tea ready for him, which it is well known he delighted to drink at all hours, particularly when sitting up late, and of which his able defence against Mr. Jonas Hanway should have obtained him a magnificent reward from the East India Company. He showed much complacency upon finding that the mistress of the house was so attentive to his singular habit; and as no man could be more polite when he chose to be so, his address to her was most courteous and engaging; and his conversation soon charmed her into a forgetfulness of his external appearance. I did not begin to keep a regular full journal till some days after we had set out from Edinburgh; but I have luckily preserved a good many fragments of his Memorabilia from his very first evening in Scotland. We had a little before this had a trial for murder, in which the judges had allowed the lapse of twenty years since its commission as a plea in bar, in conformity with foll., and Wilson's Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh, vol. i. p. 253.Editor. It was considered a very good house and was entailed, but Sir Alexander Boswell obtained an act of Parliament to sell it, to discharge the land tax from the rest of his property. It was lately occupied by a printer. Chambers. |