‘Jeremiah and Sarah Bentham, 1768.’”[399]
It was from this miserable inn that Johnson, on August 14th, sent the following note to Boswell’s house:
“Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd’s.
“Saturday night.”
Boswell went to him directly, and learnt from Scott that “the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of the window. Scott said he was afraid that he would have knocked the waiter down.” Boswell at once carried off Johnson to his own house. Scott he left behind with the sincere regret that he had not also a room for him. Could the future eminence of the great judge have been foreseen, or had his “amiable manners” been generally known, surely some one would have been found eager to welcome him as a guest and rescue him from the Canongate Stabler. “He was one of the pleasantest men I ever knew,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, fifty-five years later, when he met him at a dinner at Richmond Park, “looking very frail and even comatose.”[400] He lived some while longer, and did not die till the memory of this jaunt, and of everything else had been lost in the forgetfulness in which his mind sank beneath the burthen of fourscore years and ten.[401] Let us hope that on his first visit to Edinburgh, like Matthew Bramble, “he got decent lodgings in the house of a widow gentlewoman.”[402]
The old inn still stands, a picturesque ruin and an interesting memorial of the discomfort of a long race of wandering strangers. No one here ever repeated with emotion, either great or small, Shenstone’s lines:
“Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found