Leaving Auchinleck on the morning of November 8, our travellers arrived that night at Hamilton on the road to Edinburgh. They had crossed Drumclog Moor, the scene of the skirmish nearly one hundred years earlier where Claverhouse was beaten by the Covenanters. Scott in Old Mortality has told how in the fight John Balfour of Burley struck down Sergeant Bothwell. Fifty years or so after our travellers crossed the Moor, Thomas Carlyle and Edward Irving passed over it on foot. “It was here,” says Carlyle, “as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from me by degrees, in the softest manner, the confession that I did not think as he of the Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or should.”[815] Boswell’s record of this day’s journey is of the briefest. “We came at night to a good inn at Hamilton. I recollect no more.” A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine gives us a humorous description of the innkeeper. “Hamilton Arms, kept by Burns, tolerable. The landlord from pure insipidity will laugh at you if you come in wet through; yet he can tell a good deal about the Duke’s family.”[816] Smollett gives the little town the highest praise in his vocabulary, by calling it “one of the neatest he had seen in any country.”[817] Whatever nature could do, the force of art could no farther go last century than make a place neat. Boswell, before they left next morning, in vain tried to move Johnson to visit the Palace of Hamilton, as the Duke’s castle is called. “He had not come to Scotland to see fine places of which there were enough in England.” He would do nothing more than view the outside. RETURN TO EDINBURGH. That same night “they arrived at Edinburgh after an absence of eighty-three days. For five weeks together of the tempestuous season,” adds Boswell, “there had been no account received of us.” Yet, as the crow flies, they had never at their farthest been two hundred miles away. How vast is the change since those days! I received the other day at my house in Oxford, a letter which had been posted in Bombay just fifteen days before. Johnson would have hurried on to London had he followed his own wishes. “I long to come under your care,” he wrote to Mrs. Thrale a day or two after his arrival in Edinburgh, “but for some days cannot decently get away.” He had his morning levees to hold, and his dinner and supper parties to attend. “‘Sir,’ he said one evening, ‘we have been harassed by invitations.’ I acquiesced. ‘Ay, sir,’ he replied, ‘but how much worse would it have been if we had been neglected!’” There was one man who did not harass him. Boswell nowhere mentions that he visited Lord Auchinleck at his house in Parliament Close.
LORD HAILES.
He paid a visit to New Hailes, four miles east of Edinburgh, the seat of Sir David Dalrymple, better known by the title of Lord Hailes, which he bore as one of the judges of Scotland. “Here,” says Boswell, “we passed a most agreeable day, but,” he adds, “again I must lament that I was so indolent as to let almost all that passed evaporate into oblivion.” Johnson had first heard of his host ten years earlier. One evening, when he and Boswell were supping in a private room at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house in the Strand, “he drank a bumper to Sir David Dalrymple as ‘a man of worth, a scholar, and a wit. I have,’ said he, ‘never heard of him, except from you; but let him know my opinion of him; for, as he does not show himself much in the world, he should have the praise of the few who hear of him.’” They did not meet till Johnson came to Edinburgh, but then they at once took to each other. “I love him better than any man whom I know so little,” wrote Johnson eighteen months later. His love was no doubt increased by the decision which his friend gave a few years later in that famous case in which it was decided, by a majority of the judges, that a slave who had been brought from Jamaica to Scotland became thereby free. “Dear Lord Hailes was on the side of liberty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell.[818] He would have loved him still more for the tenderness of heart which, unlike so many of his brethren, he showed on the Bench. “When called to pass sentence of death he addressed the unfortunate convicts in a pathetic, dignified strain of piety and commiseration that made a deep impression on the audience.”[819] Many of the old judges, as is shown by the stories recorded of them, were in criminal trials little better than ruffians in ermine. If “robes and furred gowns hide all,” in many a case they had far more cruelty to cover than the unfortunate prisoner had been guilty of who was sent to the gallows. Lord Hailes, with all his kindness, was by no means faultless as a judge. He too often allowed his pedantry to override his good sense. This failing in his friend, Boswell took off in his comic poem The Court of Session Garland:
“‘This cause,’ cries Hailes, ‘to judge I can’t pretend,
For justice, I perceive, wants an e at the end.’”
According to Dr. Robert Chambers “a story was told of his once making a serious objection to a law-paper, and in consequence to the whole suit, on account of the word justice being thus spelt.”[820] Lord Braxfield, one of the ruffian judges, but a man of strong mind, “hearing him praised as a good judge, said, in his vulgar way, ‘Him! he knows nothing but the nooks of a cause.’ He was not without his crotchets. One day when he sat as President, he reprimanded a lawyer very sharply for making a ludicrous application of some text in the Gospels or Epistles. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you may take liberties with the Old Testament, but I will not suffer you to meddle with the New.’”[821]
As an historian he had considerable merits. Johnson revised the proof-sheets of his Annals of Scotland, and found them “a new mode of history in our language.” “They are very exact,” he added, “but they contain mere dry particulars. They are to be considered as a Dictionary. You know such things are there, and may be looked at when you please.”[822] Gibbon praised him as “a diligent collector, and an accurate critic;” but he complained that when he came to criticise “the two invidious chapters” in the Decline and Fall, “he scrutinized each separate passage with the dry minuteness of a special pleader; and as he was always solicitous to make, he may have succeeded sometimes in finding a flaw.”[823] Hume spoke of him with contempt. “He is a godly man; feareth the Lord and escheweth evil, and works out his salvation with fear and trembling. None of the books he publishes are of his writing; they are all historical manuscripts, of little or no consequence.”[824] “Nothing delighted him more,” writes Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “than to demolish some historical fabric which length of time had rendered venerable. I lent an old lady the first volume of his Annals. She was so ill-pleased with the rejection of some popular stories of Wallace, that she said she would drive the powder out of his lordship’s wig if she were by him.”[825] With all his critical power he was a believer in Ossian. Burke, who once met him at dinner, “found him a clever man, and generally knowing.”[826]
LORD HAILES AND DR. HALLAM.
He had been educated at Eton, and there one day had noticed a little black-looking boy, who had come up “to show for college, i.e., to stand for a scholarship on the foundation.”
“After being examined he was found entitled to be placed high in the fourth form, if he could make a copy of Latin verses in a given time. As he knew nothing of the matter, his friend bade him throw the theme assigned him over the window[827] in a quill, and he would convey him the verses ere they were wanted. He told the door-keeper to carry a pen-case to the lad under examination, who exhibited the theme, and was elected. For some months Dalrymple lent him his aid in versifying. Dr. Hallam, now Dean of Bristol and Canon of Westminster, confessed many years after, with tears in his eyes, that next to the providence of God he owed all that he had to the philanthropy of Sir David Dalrymple.”[828]