Neither did Johnson see Adam Smith, who in Hume’s house had his room whenever he chose to occupy it. To meet a famous stranger he would, we may well believe, have willingly crossed the Firth from his house in Kirkaldy. But the two men had once met in London, and “we did not take to each other,” said Johnson. Had he been more tolerant, and sought the society of these two great Scotchmen, he would have seen in Scotland the best which Scotland had to show. Even as it was, in his visit to the capital and the seats of the other universities, in his tour through Lowlands, Highlands and Isles, he saw perhaps as great a variety of men and manners as had been seen in that country by any Englishman up to his time.
[Edinburgh (August 14-18). The White Horse Inn.]
BEGINNING OF THE TOUR.
On Friday, August 6th, 1773, Dr. Johnson set off from London on his famous tour to the Western Islands of Scotland. His companion as far as Newcastle was Robert Chambers, Principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, who had been lately appointed one of the new judges for India, and was going down to his native town to take leave of his family. The two friends travelled in a post-chaise. “Life has not many better things than this,” said Johnson once when he was driven rapidly along in one with Boswell.[388] It was too costly a pleasure for him to indulge in often unless he could find a companion to share the expense. The charge for a chaise and pair of horses for two passengers from London to Edinburgh could scarcely have been kept under twenty-two pounds.[389] The weather was bright and hot.[390] At Newcastle Chambers’s place in the chaise was taken by a fellow-townsman who was destined to go far beyond him in the career of the law—William Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell, the great judge of the High Court of Admiralty. The travellers entered Scotland by Berwick-on-Tweed, passing near to those nine wells which gave their name to the estate which had come down to David Hume’s father through many generations. Very likely they dined at Dunbar, that “high and windy town,” and thought, as they crossed the Brocksburn, how Cromwell’s horse and foot charged across it in the mingled light of the harvest-moon and the early dawn on that September morning one hundred and twenty-three years before. Their next stage would bring them to Haddington, past the ruined Abbey where nearly a hundred years later that great Scotchman, Johnson’s foremost champion, was often with a contrite and almost broken heart to seek his wife’s grave in the desolate chancel. As they drove on they passed by the wide plain, shut in by the sea on one side and by a morass on the other, over which, only twenty-eight years earlier, on another misty morning in September, the rude Highlanders had chased Cope’s English Dragoons in shameful and headlong flight. Evening had overtaken the travellers by this time, so that they could not have seen “the one solitary thorn bush round which lay the greatest number of slain,” or the grey tower of the church of Preston Pans, whence the afternoon before the battle, young Alexander Carlyle had looked down upon the two armies.[391] They passed Pinkie, where the Protector Somerset’s soldiers had made such a savage massacre of the routed Scotch; and Carberry Hill, where Mary took her last farewell of Bothwell as she gave herself up to the Scottish lords. They passed, too, the serfs of Tranent and Preston Pans, “the colliers and salters who were in a state of slavery and bondage, bound to the collieries or salt-works for life.”[392]
WHITE HORSE CLOSE.
THE ROAD TO EDINBURGH.
THE WHITE HORSE INN.
Entering Edinburgh by the road which goes near Holyrood House, and driving along the Canongate, they alighted at the entrance to White Horse Close, at the end of which stood the White Horse Inn. The sign, the crest of the house of Hanover, had probably been adopted on the accession of George I., and was a proof of loyalty to the reigning family. In London in the year 1761 there were forty-nine alleys, lanes and yards which were so called.[393] It was, however, said that the name had been given as a memorial of a white horse which, by winning a race on Leith Sands, had saved its master, the inn-keeper, from ruin.[394] According to the Scotch custom the inn was generally known not by its sign, but by the name of its landlord.[395] Thus Boswell calls this house Boyd’s Inn. In the Edinburgh Directory for 1773-4 we find under the letter B, at the head of the Stablers, “Boyd, James, canongate head.” In the present time, when an inn, however small, assumes the dignified title of Hotel, we may admire the modesty of these Edinburgh innkeepers, not one of whom, pretended to be anything more than a stabler. In fact they scarcely deserved any higher name; their houses were on a level with the inn at Rochester where the two carriers in Falstaff’s time passed so restless a night. A traveller who had stayed in this house a year or two before Johnson’s visit, described it as being “crowded and confused. The master lives in the stable, the mistress is not equal to the business. You must not expect breakfast before nine o’clock, and you must think yourself happy if you do not find every room fresh mopped.”[396] The date of 1683 inscribed upon the large window above the outside steps,[397] showed that even in Johnson’s time it was an old house. For the whole of the eighteenth century it was one of the chief starting places for the stage-coaches. It sank later on into a carrier’s inn, says Sir Walter Scott, “and has since been held unworthy even of that occupation. It was a base hovel.”[398] Yet James Boyd, who kept it, retired with a fortune of several thousand pounds. That he possessed napery to the value of five hundred pounds is stated by Chambers to be a well-authenticated fact. “A large room in the house was the frequent scene of the marriages of runaway English couples. On one of the windows were scratched the words: