If, as seems likely, the examination was competitive, the boy who did not get the scholarship might not have taken altogether the same view of the matter as the pious and tearful dean. Dr. Hallam was the father of the historian, and the grandfather of Arthur Hallam. Had it not been for Lord Hailes’s good-natured roguery the In Memoriam might never have been written.
LIBRARY, NEW HAILES.
NEW HAILES.
New Hailes, as Johnson’s host told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “had been first made by Mr. Smith, a Popish architect employed in fitting up King James’s chapel at the Abbey. He planted the oldest trees. It was acquired by Lord Hailes’s grandfather, the Lord Advocate, who gave it its present name.”[829] We may wonder where poor Mr. Smith sought shelter that day when the news reached Edinburgh that James II. had fled from London. He may well have been in danger, for “the rabble,” writes Burnet, “broke into the church of Holyrood House, which had been adorned at a great charge to be a royal chapel, defaced it quite, and seized on some that were thought great delinquents.”[830] When Lord Hailes came into the property, “his first care was to fit up the library—a magnificent room. The furnishing of it with an ample store of books was the great object of his ambition.”[831] The library is now the drawing-room—the most noble and learned drawing-room that I have ever seen, for the great and well-filled book-shelves still go round it from the floor almost to the lofty ceiling. If it was in this room that Johnson was received, no doubt he behaved as he did that April day, a year or two later, when he drove down to dine with Mr. Cambridge at Twickenham. “No sooner,” says Boswell, “had we made our bow to Mr. Cambridge in his library than Johnson ran eagerly to one side of the room, intent on poring over the backs of the books.” Perhaps he turned to Lord Hailes, as he turned to Dr. Burney, on seeing his library, and said, “You are an honest man to have formed so great an accumulation of knowledge.”[832]
The house, like so many in Scotland, is built more after the continental than the English fashion. In the front is a square courtyard, on a level with which are the offices. The hall is reached by a flight of stone steps. As I came up to it a peacock was perched on the top. Above the door is inscribed the motto, Laudo manentem. Johnson’s bedroom was at one end of the house, on the same floor as the hall; but as the ground is higher on this side, it was on a level with the flower-garden, which was just beneath the windows. He had also a dressing-room, whence I looked out on pleasant hayfields, where the haymakers were hard at work. All about the house are fine trees, many of them planted, no doubt, by the old Popish architect; while on one side there is a lofty grove of beeches with a column in the middle, inscribed—
“Joanni Comiti de Stair
De Patria et Principe optime merito
Viventi positum
MDCCXLVI.”
The Earl of Stair was a Dalrymple. At the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 he had been appointed Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in South Britain.[833] Horace Walpole did not think highly of his services at this time for, after describing in the November of that year how “the Prince of Wales, the night of his son’s christening, had the citadel of Carlisle in sugar at supper, and the company besieged it with sugar-plums,” he continues, “One thing was very proper; old Marshal Stair was there, who is grown child enough to be fit to war only with such artillery.”[834] We can picture to ourselves Johnson walking up and down under the beech trees, reading the inscription, and telling how kindly he had been welcomed a few days earlier by the earl’s sister, the Countess of Loudoun, an old lady, “who in her ninety-fifth year had all her faculties entire. This,” adds Boswell, “was a very cheering sight to Dr. Johnson, who had an extraordinary desire for long life.”
With such a pleasant spot as this to live at, it is not surprising that Lord Hailes for many years would not take a house in Edinburgh, but resided constantly at New Hailes summer and winter “driving in every morning in session time before breakfast, and returning before dinner.” Dr. Alexander Carlyle, who was no bad judge of conviviality, said, “that nowhere did he get more good wine or more good cracks than from Lord Hailes.”[835] Besides his learning and his hospitality he had, like so many of Johnson’s Scotch friends, deserved the praise of being a good landlord. He did not raise his rents.[836] LORD HAILES’S WILL. On his death his will could not be found. He had no sons, and the heir-male was about to take possession of his estates to the exclusion of his daughter, Miss Hailes. She had made her preparations for leaving her old home, and had sent some of her servants to lock up his town house in New Street. As one of them was closing the shutters of a window the will dropped out upon the floor from behind a panel. It was found to secure her in the possession of the estates. She enjoyed them for upwards of forty years.[837]
LORD ELIBANK.