BOSWELL’S FAME.

How widely Boswell’s influence is felt is shown in a story which was told me by Sir Charles Sikes, the benevolent inventor of the Post Office Savings Banks, and no mean Johnsonian. One day he had gone under an archway in Fleet Street to shun a shower, as Burke might have gone.[812] Being “knowing and conversible,” he fell into talk with a sergeant of police who was also taking shelter, and whose tongue showed that he was an Irishman. He came, he said, from the west of Ireland. When he was a boy the parish priest had lent him a copy of the Life of Johnson. He had read it again and again, till at last the wish grew so strong upon him to see with his own eyes the scenes which in the pages of the book were so familiar to him, that he came to London, not knowing what employment he should find, but bent on seeing Fleet Street. What pilgrimages have not men made from the other side of the Atlantic to the same spots! With their Boswell in their hands they have wandered by Charing Cross, “with its full tide of human existence;” up the Strand, “through the greatest series of shops in the world;” under Temple Bar, where Johnson’s and Goldsmith’s names did not mingle with those of the Scotch rebels[813]; along Fleet Street, with “its very animated appearance,” to the courts and lanes and taverns where the spirits of the men who gathered round the great Lexicographer seem still to linger. The Boswells are proud of their descent from a man who fell at Flodden Field. There are thousands and ten thousands of Scotchmen who got knocked on their heads in border forays, but only one who wrote the Life of Johnson. “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors,” and among Scotch authors Sir Walter Scott alone equals Boswell in the extent of his popularity. The genius of Burns lies hidden from most Englishmen in the dialect in which his finest poetry is written. Never did one man of letters do another a more shameful wrong than when Macaulay laboured at the ridiculous paradox that the first of biographers was “a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect.” He was thirty years old when he wrote this. Yet, to borrow Johnson’s words, it was such stuff as a young man talks when he first begins to think himself a clever fellow, and he ought to have been whipped for it. The worst of it is that Macaulay, like Rousseau, talked his nonsense so well that it still passes for gospel with all those who have advanced as far as reading, but have not as yet attained to thinking. We may feel thankful that he did not with his overpowering common sense go on to overwhelm the memory of Goldsmith.

In the price set on autographs we have a means of measuring in some fashion the estimation in which men are held by posterity. The standard is but a rough one, however, for it is affected by the number of their writings which chance to have been preserved: judging by it, Boswell’s rank is very high. There were, probably, few men whose career he more envied than that of Lord Bute’s “errand-goer,” Alexander Wedderburne, who rose to be Lord Loughborough, Earl of Rosslyn and Lord High Chancellor of England. Yet a letter of his I have recently seen offered for sale at ten shillings and sixpence, while Boswell’s was marked nine guineas. While I exult at seeing that one author equals eighteen Lord Chancellors, I sometimes sigh over the high prices which have hitherto kept me from obtaining a specimen of the handwriting of a man at whose works I have so long laboured.

It is to be hoped that the day will at length come when those in whose veins Boswell’s blood still flows will take that just and reasonable view of their famous forefather which will lead them, from time to time, to throw open “the rocks and woods,” and even “the stately house” of Auchinleck to strangers from afar. It was he who “Johnsonised the land,” and they therefore should have some indulgence for the enthusiasm which he created. “The sullen dignity of the castle with which Johnson was delighted” they should not keep altogether to themselves. Another famous man had beheld those ruins also. “Since Paoli stood upon our old castle,” wrote Boswell to a friend, “it has an additional dignity.” Who would not like to stand upon it also, and to see the Lugar running beneath, “bordered by high rocks shaded with wood?” Into this beautiful stream falls “a pleasing brook,” to use Johnson’s odd description of a rivulet which has cut a deep passage through the sandstone. “It runs,” he adds, “by a red rock, out of which has been hewn a very agreeable and commodious summer-house.” I have been told that the meeting of the waters is a scene of striking beauty. Then there are “the venerable old trees under the shade of which,” writes Boswell, “my ancestors had walked,” and the groves where, as he told Johnson, it was his intention to erect a monument to his “reverend friend.” “Sir,” he answered, little flattered by the prospect of “a lapidary inscription,” “I hope to see your grand-children.” Who would not gladly stroll along Lord Auchinleck’s via sacra, “that road which he made to the church, for above three miles, on his own estate, through a range of well-inclosed farms, with a row of trees on each side of it?” The avenue is composed mainly of oaks and beeches, planted alternately; but the finest of the trees were brought down a few years ago in a great storm which swept over the country. Only one or two small farms remain, but there are the ruins of another. From the road a most pleasant view is seen, grassy slopes running down to the Lugar, with hedge-rows and trees growing in them after the English fashion. Across the river the ground rises rapidly in tilled fields and meadows and groves to a high range of hills. To the south-west lies the village of Ochiltree, whence Scott perhaps derived old Edie’s name in the Antiquary.

AUCHINLECK MANSE.

The manse still stands where Johnson dined with the Rev. John Dun, who had been Boswell’s dominie, and had been rewarded for his services by the presentation to the living of Auchinleck. He rashly attacked before his guest the Church of England, and “talked of fat bishops and drowsy deans. Dr. Johnson was so highly offended, that he said to him, ‘Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot.’” Dun must have complained to Boswell of being thus publicly likened to the proverbial Hottentot, for in the second edition of the Tour to the Hebrides his name is suppressed. The manse has been enlarged since those days, and surrounded with a delightful garden which might excite the envy, if not of a drowsy dean, at all events of a south country vicar. In the venerable minister, Dr. James Chrystal, who has lived there for more than fifty years, Johnson would have found a man “whom, if he should have quarrelled with him, he would have found the most difficulty how to abuse.”

AUCHINLECK CHURCHYARD.

The parish church where Johnson refused to attend Boswell and his father at public worship has been rebuilt. In the churchyard stands a fine old beech which might have been called venerable even a hundred years ago. There, too, is the vault of the Boswells with their coat-of-arms engraved on it, and their motto, Vraye Foy. In a niche cut in the solid rock lies Boswell’s body. He died in London, at his house in Great Portland Street, but in accordance with the direction in his will he was buried “in the family burial-place in the church of Auchinleck.” Though the vault is now at a little distance from the church, yet in the old building, which did not occupy precisely the same site, it was under a room at the back of the Boswells’ pew. On a wall in the churchyard I noticed a curiously-carved stone with the following inscription:

M
G. W.
1621
M. G.
HUNC TUMULUM CONJUNX
POSUIT DILECTA MARITO.
QUEMQUE VIRO POSUIT
DESTINAT HORA SIBI.