I’ll see ye triumph ere I fa’;
My parting breath shall boast you mine—
Good night, and joy be wi’ ye a’.”[805]
Lockhart goes, however, too far when he exalts him in comparison with his father. Boswell, I feel sure, would never have been guilty of the act which involved his son in the unhappy duel in which he lost his life. In two scurrilous newspapers he had secretly defamed his kinsman, Mr. James Stuart, of Dunearn, “with whom he had long been on good terms.” Though the articles were written in a disguised hand, the authorship was detected. He received a challenge from the injured man, and at the first shot fell mortally wounded. He dined with Scott a day or two before the duel, and “though Charles Matthews (the famous comedian) was present, poor Sir Alexander Boswell’s songs, jokes, and anecdotes exhibited no symptom of eclipse.”[806]
SIR JAMES BOSWELL.
His only son, Sir James Boswell, the last male descendant of the author of the immortal Life, shared his father’s illiberal feelings about Johnson. Miss Macleod of Macleod told me that when she was on a visit at Auchinleck, he said to her one day that he did not know how he should name one of his race-horses. She suggested Boswell’s Johnsoniana, which made him very angry. He was, I learnt, a man of great natural ability, who, had he chosen, might have become distinguished. His feeling of soreness against his grandfather was partly due to another cause than dislike of hero-worship. Boswell, in an access of that particular kind of folly which he called “feudal enthusiasm,” had entailed his estates on the heirs male of his father to the exclusion of his own nearer female descendants. Sir James, who had no sons, saw that Auchinleck on his death would pass away from his daughters to his cousin, Thomas Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck’s grandson by his second son David. He managed to get the settlement upset on the plea that in the deed the first five letters of the word irredeemably were written upon an erasure.[807] It is not impossible that the lawyer who drew it up, not liking the provision, intentionally contrived this loop-hole.
Among Boswell’s male descendants, his second son James was, so far as I know, the only one who was not ashamed of the Life of Johnson. He supplied notes to the later editions. His father, writing of him when he was eleven years old, says: “My second son is an extraordinary boy; he is much of his father (vanity of vanities).”[808] Croker describes him as “very convivial, and in other respects like his father—though altogether on a smaller scale.”[809] According to Lockhart, he was “a man of considerable learning and admirable social qualities. To him Sir Walter Scott was warmly attached. He died suddenly in the prime of life, about a fortnight before his brother.”[810]
When Boswell, at the age of twenty-seven, published his Account of Corsica, he boasted in his preface that “he cherished the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object to the noblest minds in all ages.” When he saw his Life of Johnson reach its second edition, he said with a frankness which is almost touching, “I confess that I am so formed by nature and by habit, that to restrain the effusion of delight on having obtained such fame, to me would be truly painful. Why then should I suppress it? Why ‘out of the abundance of the heart’ should I not speak?” He goes on to mention the spontaneous praise which he has received from eminent persons, “much of which,” he adds, “I have under their hands to be reposited in my archives at Auchinleck.” How little did he foresee that his executors, with a brutish ignorance worthy of perpetual execration, would destroy his manuscripts! If Oliver Goldsmith had had children and grand-children, they too, when they read of his envy and his vanity, when they were told that “in conversation he was an empty, noisy, blundering rattle,”[811] might have blushed to own that they were sprung from the author of The Deserted Village and The Vicar of Wakefield.
BOSWELL’S DESCENDANTS.
It is a melancholy thing that Boswell’s descendants should have seen their famous ancestor’s faults so clearly as to have been unable to enjoy that pride which was so justly their due, in being sprung from a man of such real, if curious genius. Was it nothing to have written the best biography which the world has ever seen? Nothing to have increased more than any writer of his generation “the public stock of harmless pleasure?” Nothing to have “exhibited” with the greatest skill “a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near half a century?” Nothing to have been the delight of men of the greatest and most varied genius? Nothing to be read wherever the English tongue is spoken, and, as seems likely, as long as the English tongue shall last? Sume superbiam quæsitam meritis, “Assume the honours justly thine,” we would say to each one of his race.