Towards Lord Auchinleck Johnson bore no resentment. With him the heat of altercation soon passed away, but not the memory of the hospitality which he had received in his house. In not a single word spoken or written has he attacked him. On the contrary, in his Journey to the Western Islands, he only mentions him to praise him. When, six years later, he published the first four volumes of his Lives of the Poets, he wrote to Boswell: “Write me word to whom I shall send sets of Lives; would it please Lord Auchinleck?” A few months after this he wrote to him: “Let me know what reception you have from your father, and the state of his health. Please him as much as you can, and add no pain to his last years.” The old lord was not so placable. He had that “want of tenderness which,” said Johnson, “is want of parts.” This part of his character is seen in the following anecdote recorded of him by his son:
“I mentioned to Johnson a respectable person of a very strong mind, who had little of that tenderness which is common to human nature; as an instance of which, when I suggested to him that he should invite his son, who had been settled ten years in foreign parts, to come home and pay him a visit, his answer was, ‘No, no, let him mind his business.’ Johnson. ‘I do not agree with him, Sir, in this. Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.’”
LORD AUCHINLECK’S RESENTMENT.
He had what Boswell calls “the dignified courtesy of an old Baron,” and when Johnson left “was very civil to him, and politely attended him to his post-chaise.” But he was not in the least soothed by the compliments which he paid him in his book. Boswell had hoped that he might be moved. Writing to Johnson just after it had been published, he said: “You have done Auchinleck much honour, and have, I hope, overcome my father, who has never forgiven your warmth for monarchy and episcopacy. I am anxious to see how your pages will operate upon him.”[800] His anxious wish was grievously disappointed. A few months later he wrote to his friend Temple: “My father is most unhappily dissatisfied with me.... He harps on my going over Scotland with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous!) and wandering (or some such phrase) to London. How hard it is that I am totally excluded from parental comfort! I have a mind to go to Auchinleck next autumn, and try what living in a mixed stupidity of attention to common objects and restraint from expressing any of my own feelings can do with him.”[801] When his father and Johnson were both dead he indulged in the pious hope that “as they were both worthy Christian men, they had met in happiness. But I must observe,” he adds, “in justice to my friend’s political principles and my own, that they have met in a place where there is no room for Whiggism.” Johnson, it is true, “always said the first Whig was the Devil,” but on the other hand, some Presbyterian who drew up an epitaph on Lochiel, declared in it that he “is now a Whig in heaven.”[802]
That pride in his ancient blood, which Boswell boasted was his predominant passion, was very strong in the old lord. In the son, if it really existed in any strength, it was happily overpowered by a host of other and better feelings. He had travelled widely, he had seen a great variety of men, some of them among the most famous of their age, and had learnt to value genius without troubling himself about its pedigree. His successors at Auchinleck had something of the narrowness of the old judge. SIR ALEXANDER BOSWELL. “His eldest son, Sir Alexander Boswell,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “was a proud man, and like his grandfather, thought that his father lowered himself by his deferential suit and service to Johnson. I have observed he disliked any allusion to the book or to Johnson himself, and I have heard that Johnson’s fine picture by Sir Joshua was sent upstairs out of the sitting apartments.”[803] He was not too proud a man to write a poem on the anniversary of the Accession of George IV., and what is George IV. now? It was not from any dulness of mind that he did not value his father’s book. “He had,” says Lockhart, “all Bozzy’s cleverness, good-humour, and joviality, without one touch of his meaner qualities, wrote some popular songs, which he sang capitally, and was moreover a thorough bibliomaniac.”[804] It was due to him and a friend, that the Burns monument at Ayr was erected. They summoned a public meeting, but no one attended except themselves. Little daunted they appointed a chairman, proposed resolutions, carried them unanimously, passed a vote of thanks, and issued subscription lists. More than £2,000 was subscribed, and the monument was opened by Sir Alexander shortly before his death. That he was not wanting in tenderness of heart is shown by some of his poems. How pretty is the following verse in an address by an aged father to his children:—
“The auld will speak, the young maun hear,
Be cantie, but be gude and leal;
Your ain ills aye hae heart to bear,
Anither’s aye hae heart to feel.
So, ere I set, I’ll see ye shine;