Eminent lawyers who are also industrious, and even eminent writers, were a feature of the time, but of them I have already spoken and there is little here to add. Monboddo had a remarkable experience in his youth; the very day, in 1736, he returned to Edinburgh from studying abroad he heard at nightfall a commotion in the street. In nightdress and slippers he stepped from the door and was borne along by a wild mob, not a few of whom were attired as strangely as himself. It was that famous affair of Captain Porteous, and, nolens volens, he needs must witness that sordid yet picturesque tragedy whose incidents, you are convinced, he never forgot, and often, as an old man, retailed to a newer generation.
JAMES BOSWELL
From an Engraving after Sir Joshua Reynolds P.R.A.
Like many another Scots lawyer, Lord Kames had a keen love for the land, keener in his case because it had come to him from his forbears; but his zeal was not always according to knowledge. One of the “fads” of the time was a wonderful fertilising powder. He told one of his tenants that he would be able to carry the manure of an acre of land in his coat pocket, “And be able to bring back the crop in yer waistcoat pouch?” was the crushing reply. He would have his joke, cruel and wicked, at any cost. To him belongs the well-nigh incredible story of a murder trial at Ayr in 1780. He knew the accused and had played chess with him. “That’s checkmate for you, Matthie,” he chuckled in ungodly glee when the verdict was recorded. This story, by the way, used to be told of Braxfield, to whom it clearly does not belong, and one wished it did not belong to Kames either. He spared himself as little as he did others. He lived in New Street, an early old-time improvement on the north side of the Canongate, and from there he went to the Parliament House in a sedan chair. One morning, near the end, he was being helped into it, for he was old and infirm, when James Boswell crossed his path. Jamie was always in one scrape or the other, but this time you fancy he had done something specially notorious. “I shall shortly be seeing your father,” said Kames (old Auchinleck had died that year (1782), as on the 27th of December did Kames himself); “have you any message for him? Shall I tell him how you are getting on?” You imagine his diabolical grin and Bozzy’s confused answer.
Beside these quaint figures Lord Hailes, with his ponderous learning, is a mere Dry-as-dust antiquary—the dust lies ever deeper over his many folios; of his finical exactness there still linger traditions in the Parliament House. It is said he dismissed a case because a word was wrongly spelt in one of the numbers of process. Thus he earned himself a couplet in the once famous Court of Session Garland.
“To judge of this matter I cannot pretend,
For justice, my Lords, wants an ‘e’ at the end.”
So wrote Boswell, himself, though he only partly belongs to Edinburgh, not the least interesting figure of our period. There is more than one story of him and Kames. The judge had playfully suggested that Boswell should write his biography! How devoutly you wish he had. What an entertaining and famous book it had been! but perhaps he had only it in him to do one biography, and we know how splendid that was. Poor Bozzy once complained to the old judge that even he, Bozzy himself, was occasionally dull. “Homer sometimes nods,” said Kames in a reassuring tone, but with a grin that promised mischief. The other looked as pleased as possible till the old cynic went on: “Indeed, sir, it is the only chance you have of resembling him.” Old Auchinleck, his father, was horrified at his son’s devotion to Johnson. “Jamie has gaen clean gyte. What do you think, man? He’s done wi’ Paoli—he’s aff wi’ the land-loupin’ scoondrel o’ a Corsican. Whae’s tail do ye think he has preened himsel’ tae noo? A dominie man—an auld dominie who keepit a schule and caa’ed it an Acaademy!” In fact, the great Samuel pleased none of the Boswell clan except Boswell and Boswell’s baby daughter. Auchinleck had many caustic remarks even after he had seen the sage: “He was only a dominie, and the worst-mannered dominie I ever met.” So much for the father. The wife was not more favourable: “She had often seen a bear led by a man, but never till now had she seen a man led by a bear.” Afterwards, when the famous biography was published, the sons were horribly ashamed both of it and of him. Bozzy has given us so much amusement—we recognise his inimitable literary touch—that we are rather proud of and grateful to him; but then, we don’t look at the matter with the eyes of his relatives.
Johnson was himself in Edinburgh. You remember how he arrived in February 1773 at Boyd’s Whitehorse Inn off St. Mary’s Wynd, not the more famous Inn of that name in the Whitehorse Close down the Canongate; how angry he was with the waiter for lifting with his dirty paw the sugar to put in his lemonade; how, in the malodorous High Street, he pleasantly remarked to Boswell, “I smell you in the dark”; how, as he listened at Holyrood to the story of the Rizzio murder, he muttered a line of the old ballad Johnnie Armstrong’s last good-night—“And ran him through the fair bodie.” They took him to the Royal Infirmary, and he noted the inscription “Clean your feet.” “Ah,” said he, “there is no occasion for putting this at the doors of your churches.” The gibe was justified; he had just looked in at St. Giles’, then used for every strange civic purpose, and plastered and twisted about to every strange shape. Most interesting to me is that Sunday morning, 15th August 1773, when Bozzy and Principal Robertson toiled with him up the College Wynd to see the University, and passed by Scott’s birthplace. The Wizard of the North was then two years old, and who could guess that his fame in after years would be greater than that of those three eminent men of letters put together? In this strange remote way do epochs touch one another. No wonder Bozzy’s relatives got tired of his last hobby, his very subject himself got tired. “Sir,” said the sage, “you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.” Yet Bozzy knew what he was about when he stuck to his one topic. After his idol was gone, what was there for him but the bottle? It was one of the earliest recollections of Lord Jeffrey that he had assisted as a boy in putting the biographer to bed in a state of absolute unconsciousness. Next morning Boswell was told of the service rendered: he clapped the lad on the head, and complacently congratulated him. “If you go on as you’ve begun, you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet.” And so much bemused the greatest of biographers vanishes from our sight.