AUCHINLECK.
Lord Auchinleck had taken unto himself a second wife on the very day of his son’s marriage. She was, in all likelihood, in the house at the time of Johnson’s visit, but neither by him nor Boswell is she once mentioned. She remained, no doubt, silent and insignificant. With their reception they must have been satisfied on the whole, as they prolonged their stay till the sixth day, in spite of the famous altercation which Boswell’s piety forbade him to record at any length. That only one such scene should have occurred speaks well for the self-control both of host and guest. To Boswell Johnson had quickly become attached. “Give me your hand,” he said to him in the first weeks of their acquaintance, “I have taken a liking to you.” A month or so later he added, “There are few people to whom I take so much as to you.” But Lord Auchinleck, though he might have respected he never could have liked. No men were more unlike in everything but personal appearance, than Boswell and his father. The old man had none of that “facility of manners,” of which, according to Adam Smith, the son “was happily possessed.”[770] Whence he got it we are nowhere told—perhaps from his mother. It certainly was not from his paternal grandfather, the old advocate, “who was a slow, dull man of unwearied perseverance and unmeasurable length in his speeches. It was alleged he never understood a cause till he had lost it thrice.”[771] BOSWELL’S DUTCH BLOOD. There were those who attributed Boswell’s eccentricities to his great grandmother, Veronica, Countess of Kincardine, a Dutch lady of the noble house of Sommelsdyck. “For this marriage,” writes Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “their posterity paid dear, for most of them had peculiarities which they had better have wanted.” He adds that “Boswell’s behaviour on the occasion of the riots in Edinburgh about the Douglas cause, savoured so much of insanity, that it was generally imputed to his Dutch blood.”[772] Why madness was supposed to come from Holland I do not know. Sir William Temple, writing of that country, says: “In general all appetites and passions seem to run lower and cooler here than in other countries where I have conversed. Their tempers are not airy enough for joy or any unusual strains of pleasant humour, nor warm enough for love. This is talked of sometimes among the younger men, but as a thing they have heard of rather than felt; and as a discourse that becomes them rather than affects them.”[773] All this was the very reverse of Boswell’s eager and wild youth, though perhaps not unlike the character of his father and grandfather. AUCHINLECK LIBRARY. There was one thing in common between Johnson and the old judge, both were sound scholars. At Auchinleck there was a library “which,” says Boswell, “incurious editions of the Greek and Roman classics is, I suppose, not excelled by any private collection in Great Britain.”
Here Johnson found an edition of Anacreon which he had long sought in vain. “They had therefore much matter for conversation without touching on the fatal topics of difference.” In all questions of Church and State they were wide as the poles asunder. In the perfect confidence which each man had in his own judgment there was nothing to choose between them.
LORD AUCHINLECK.
“My father,” writes Boswell, “was as sanguine a Whig and Presbyterian as Dr. Johnson was a Tory and Church-of-England man: and as he had not much leisure to be informed of Dr. Johnson’s great merits by reading his works, he had a partial and unfavourable notion of him, founded on his supposed political tenets; which were so discordant to his own, that instead of speaking of him with that respect to which he was entitled, he used to call him ‘a Jacobite fellow.’ Knowing all this, I should not have ventured to bring them together, had not my father, out of kindness to me, desired me to invite Dr. Johnson to his house. I was very anxious that all should be well; and begged of my friend to avoid three topics, as to which they differed very widely; Whiggism, Presbyterianism, and—Sir John Pringle. He said courteously, ‘I shall certainly not talk on subjects which I am told are disagreeable to a gentleman under whose roof I am; especially, I shall not do so to your father.’”
Yet with all Lord Auchinleck’s gravity and contempt of his son’s flightiness, he had known what it was not only to be young, but to be foolish. Like so many of the young Scotchmen of old, he had been sent to Holland to study civil law. Thence he had made his way to Paris, where he had played the fop. Years afterwards one of the companions of his youth, meeting his son at Lord Kames’s table, “told him that he had seen his father strutting abroad in red-heeled shoes and red stockings. The lad was so much diverted with it that he could hardly sit on his chair for laughing.”[774] His appointment as judge he owed to that most corrupt of Whig ministers, the Duke of Newcastle,[775] and he was as Whiggish as his patron. King William III., “one of the most worthless scoundrels that ever existed,” according to Johnson, was to him the greatest hero in modern times. Presbyterianism he loved all the more because it was a cheap religion, and narrowed the power of the clergy. He laid it down as a rule that a poor clergy was ever a pure clergy. He added that in former times they had timber communion cups and silver ministers, but now we were getting silver cups and timber ministers.[776] According to Sir Walter Scott he carried “his Whiggery and Presbyterianism to such a height, that once, when a countryman came in to state some justice business, and being required to make his oath, declined to do so before his lordship, because he was not a covenanted magistrate—‘Is that a’ your objection, mon?’ said the judge: ‘come your ways in here, and we’ll baith of us tak the solemn league and covenant together.’ The oath was accordingly agreed and sworn to by both, and I dare say it was the last time it ever received such homage.”[777] He would have nothing to do with clearing his tongue of Scotticisms, or with smoothing and rounding his periods on the model of the English classical authors. “His Scotch was broad and vulgar.”[778] In one thing at all events he was sure of receiving Johnson’s warm approval. He was a great planter of trees. “It was,” he said, “his favourite recreation. In his vacations he used to prune with his own hands the trees which he himself had planted. Beginning at five in the morning, he wrought with his knife every spare hour. Of Auchinleck he was passionately fond.”[779] He was not the man to prefer Fleet Street to the beauties of Nature. “I perceive some dawnings of taste for the country,” wrote his son on one of his visits to his old home. “I will force a taste for rural beauties.”[780] He never succeeded in the attempt, and though he often boasted of “walking among the rocks and woods of his ancestors,” it was from a distance that he most admired them.
Rarely were two men more unlike. The old man had in excess that foresight which in Boswell was so largely wanting. He had built himself a new house, which Johnson describes as “very magnificent and very convenient;” but he had proceeded “so slowly and prudently that he hardly felt the expense.”[781] Across the front of it he put the inscription—
“Quod petis hic est,