Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)

by George Birkbeck Norman Hill

Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit æquus.”[782]

“It is,” writes Boswell, “characteristic of the founder; but the animus æquus is, alas! not inheritable, nor the subject of devise. He always talked to me as if it were in a man’s own power to attain it; but Dr. Johnson told me that he owned to him, when they were alone, his persuasion that it was in a great measure constitutional, or the effect of causes which do not depend on ourselves, and that Horace boasts too much when he says, æquum mi animum ipse parabo.”

JAMES BOSWELL.

He had, too, that sobriety of character in which his son was so conspicuously wanting. “His age, his office, and his character, had given him an acknowledged claim to great attention in whatever company he was, and he could ill brook any diminution of it.” He was by no means deficient in humour, and in this respect father and son were alike. “He had a great many good stories, which he told uncommonly well, and he was remarkable for ‘humour, incolumi gravitate,’ as Lord Monboddo used to characterize it.”

The contrast between his dignity and gravity, and Boswell’s bustling and most comical liveliness, must have been as amusing as it was striking. His ignorance of his son’s genius, and the contempt for him which he did not conceal, heightened the picture. Johnson’s presence would have greatly added to the interest of the scene, for Boswell must have constantly wavered between his admiration of his idol and his awe of his father. A few years later Miss Burney met Boswell at Streatham, and thus describes him, no doubt with a good deal of exaggeration:

“He spoke the Scotch accent strongly. He had an odd mock solemnity of manner, that he had acquired imperceptibly from constantly thinking of and imitating Dr. Johnson. There was something slouching in his gait and dress, that wore an air, ridiculously enough, of purporting to personify the same model. His clothes were always too large for him; his hair or wig was constantly in a state of negligence; and he never for a moment sat still or upright upon a chair. When he met with Dr. Johnson he commonly forbore even answering anything that was said, or attending to anything that went forward, lest he should miss the smallest sound from that voice to which he paid such exclusive homage. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropt open to catch every syllable that might be uttered. The Doctor generally treated him as a schoolboy, whom without the smallest ceremony he pardoned or rebuked alternately.”[783]

It is probable that this description is heightened by Miss Burney’s wounded vanity. Boswell had not read her Evelina, and when he was reproached by Johnson with being a Brangton—one of the characters in the novel—he did not know what was meant. She was as careful in recording the conversation that was about herself as Boswell was in recording Johnson’s. Her great hero was herself. The voices to which she paid her homage were those in which she was praised and flattered.

In another place she describes “the singularity of his comic-serious face and manner.”[784] He himself has more than once drawn his own character. He was, he flattered himself, a citizen of the world; one who in his travels never felt himself from home. In that impudent Correspondence which he and his friend Andrew Erskine published when they were still almost lads, he thus describes himself:

“The author of the Ode to Tragedy is a most excellent man; he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness. His parts are bright; and his education has been good. He has travelled in post-chaises miles without number. He is fond of seeing much of the world. He eats of every good dish, especially apple-pie. He drinks old hock. He has a very fine temper. He is somewhat of an humorist, and a little tinctured with pride. He has a good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous. He has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast. He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old. His shoes are neatly made, and he never wears spectacles.”[785]