On Thursday, October 28, a postchaise which Boswell had ordered from Glasgow, “came for us,” he says, “and we drove on in high spirits.” On their way they stopped at Dunbarton, then “a small but good old town, consisting principally of one large street in the form of a crescent;”[739] but now a smoky seat of the iron ship-building industry. The steep rock on which the Castle stands Johnson “ascended with alacrity.” THE “SARACEN’S HEAD,” GLASGOW. At Glasgow they stayed at the “Saracen’s Head,” “the paragon of inns in the eyes of the Scotch,” says a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, “but most wretchedly managed.”[740] Our two travellers seem to have been contented. Johnson, no doubt, was kept in the best of humours by the sight of a great many letters from England, after the long interval of sixty-eight days during which not a line had reached him. “He enjoyed in imagination the comforts which we could now command, and seemed to be in high glee. I remember, he put a leg up on each side of the grate, and said, with a mock solemnity, by way of soliloquy, but loud enough for me to hear it: ‘Here am I, an ENGLISH man, sitting by a coal fire.’” Of fires made by peat, that “sullen fuel,” he had had enough in the last two months. All along the sea-board coal was made artificially dear by the folly of Parliament. A duty of five shillings and fourpence per chaldron, says Knox, was levied on coal at ports; none on inland coal. It had to be landed at a port where there is a custom-house, and might then be re-shipped for some other place in the neighbourhood.[741] Custom-houses were few and far between, so that in many cases, if coal was used at all, it would have had to be twice landed and twice shipped. On this mischievous regulation Adam Smith remarks: “Where coals are naturally cheap they are consumed duty free; where they are naturally dear, they are loaded with a heavy duty.”[742]
The “Saracen’s Head” with its coal fire has disappeared. My boatman had heard the old people talk of it. In this inn the following morning Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two of the other professors of the University breakfasted with Johnson. He met some of them also at dinner, tea, and supper. “I was not much pleased with any of them,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale. Boswell unfortunately was again lazy with his journal, and kept no record of the talk. THE GLASGOW PROFESSORS. Writing long afterwards, he says: “The general impression upon my memory is, that we had not much conversation at Glasgow, where the professors, like their brethren at Aberdeen, did not venture to expose themselves much to the battery of cannon which they knew might play upon them.” Reid’s silence was perhaps merely due to that reserve which he generally shewed among strangers.[743] Had fate been kinder, the great Clow might have been still among them, who twenty-two years before had been preferred both to Hume and Burke as Adam Smith’s successor in the Chair of Logic.[744] The story of the Billingsgate altercation between Smith and Johnson, recorded by Sir Walter Scott, is wholly untrue. Smith was not at this time in Glasgow. It is, no doubt, one of those tales about Johnson in which Scotch invention was humorously displayed. It was, perhaps, meant as a reply to the question which one day, in London, he put to Adam Smith, who was boasting of Glasgow, “Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?” Boswell says: “I put him in mind of it to-day while he expressed his admiration of the elegant buildings, and whispered him, ‘Don’t you feel some remorse?’” Smith’s pride in the city where he had spent more than three years as a student, and twelve as a professor, was assuredly well-founded. Johnson calls it “opulent and handsome,” and Boswell “beautiful.” GLASGOW IN DAYS OF OLD. Nearly two centuries earlier Camden had said that “for pleasant situation, apple-trees, and other like fruit-trees, it is much commended.”[745] Defoe describes it as “indeed a very fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together. It is the cleanest, and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.”[746] Another traveller of about the same date says that “it is the beautifullest little city he had seen in Britain. It stands deliciously on the banks of the River Clyde.”[747] In June, 1757, John Wesley went up to the top of the cathedral steeple. “It gave us a fine prospect,” he writes, “both of the city and the adjacent country. A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in England.”[748] Smollett swells the general chorus of praise: “Glasgow is the pride of Scotland. It is one of the prettiest towns in Europe.”[749] Pennant, who visited it the year before Johnson, calls it “the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw. The view from the Cross has an air of vast magnificence.”[750]
At the Rebellion of 1745 the citizens had shown the greatest loyalty. They raised and supported at their own expense two battalions of six hundred men each, who joined the duke’s army. Their town was occupied by the Pretender’s forces, who for ten days lived there at free quarters. They had had to pay, moreover, two heavy fines, amounting to more than nine thousand pounds, imposed on them for their fidelity to the Hanoverian Family. In 1749, in answer to their petition for relief, they received a grant from Parliament of ten thousand pounds.[751] On April 24 of that same year a stage-coach began to run between Glasgow and Edinburgh, starting from Edinburgh every Monday and Thursday, and from Glasgow every Tuesday and Friday. “Every person pays nine shillings fare, and is allowed a stone-weight of luggage.”[752] By the year 1783 far greater facilities were afforded. In John Tait’s Directory for Glasgow of that year (p. 77) it is announced that “three machines set out from each town every day at eight morning. They stop on the road and change horses. Tickets, 10s. 6d. each.” There was another daily “machine” belonging to a different set of proprietors, besides one which ran only three times a week, and charged but 8s. 6d. “The Carlisle Diligence,” it is announced, “sets out every lawful day.”
As we gaze on the filthy river which runs by the large city, on the dense cloud of smoke which hangs over it, on the grimy streets which have swallowed up the country far and wide, while we exult in the display of man’s ingenuity and strength, and in the commerce by which the good things of earth are so swiftly and cheaply interchanged, we may mourn over the beautiful little town among the apple-trees which stood so deliciously on the banks of the fair and pure stream that ran to seawards beneath the arches of the old stone bridge. How far removed from us are those days when Glasgow was pillaged by the wild rabble of Highlanders! Yet I have an uncle[753] still living who remembers his grandfather and his grandfather’s brother, one of whom had climbed up a tree to see the other march with a body of Worcestershire volunteers against the Young Pretender.
Johnson, after seeing the sights of the city, visited the college. “It has not had,” he writes, “a sufficient share of the increasing magnificence of the place.” From the account which Dr. Alexander Carlyle gives of the citizens, as he had known them about thirty years earlier, they were not likely to trouble themselves much about the glory of their University. With a few exceptions they were “shopkeepers and mechanics, or successful pedlars, who occupied large warerooms full of manufactures of all sorts to furnish a cargo to Virginia. In those accomplishments and that taste that belong to people of opulence, much more to persons of education, they were far behind the citizens of Edinburgh.” There was not a teacher of French or of music in the whole town. GLASGOW UNIVERSITY. Nevertheless, in the University itself he found “learning an object of more importance, and the habit of application much more general” than in the rival institution in the capital.[754] Wesley compared the two squares which formed the college with the small quadrangles of Lincoln College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow, and did not think them larger, or at all handsomer. He was surprised at the dress of the students. “They wear scarlet gowns, reaching only to their knees. Most I saw were very dirty, some very ragged, and all of very coarse cloth.”[755] How much more surprised would he have been at the far shorter gowns now worn by the commoners in his own university, showing, as they do, a raggedness which is not the effect of age and wear, but of intentional mutilation! There is an affectation of antiquity quite as much in a freshman’s gown, as in the pedigree of some upstart who boasts that he is sprung from the Plantagenets. The college numbered at this time about four hundred students, most of whom lived in lodgings, but some boarded with the professors.[756]
PRINCIPAL LEECHMAN.
The principal was Dr. Leechman, whose sermon on prayer had once raised a storm “among the high-flying clergy.”[757]
“In his house Dr. Johnson had the satisfaction of being told that his name had been gratefully celebrated in one of the parochial congregations in the Highlands, as the person to whose influence it was chiefly owing that the New Testament was allowed to be translated into the Erse language. It seems some political members of the Society in Scotland for propagating Christian Knowledge had opposed this pious undertaking, as tending to preserve the distinction between the Highlanders and Lowlanders.”
Johnson, in a letter full of generous indignation, had maintained that “he that voluntarily continues ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces,” and had compared these political Christians to the planters of America, “a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.”[758] Though he was no doubt struck by Leechman’s appearance, “which was that of an ascetic, reduced by fasting and prayer,” yet in his talk he could have had no pleasure. “He was not able to carry on common conversation, and when he spoke at all, it was a short lecture.” The young students who were invited to his house, longed to be summoned from the library to tea in the drawing-room, where his wife “maintained a continued conversation on plays, novels, poetry, and the fashions.”[759]
