Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)

by George Birkbeck Norman Hill

The virtue was somewhat slow in coming. Saint-Fond, who got a peep into the chapel, inferred that it was used for a winter store-house for the carrots and turnips which grew in the kitchen-garden that surrounded it. It has of late years been cleared of rubbish and restored to decency, which, perhaps, is all the restoration that is desirable. Some shrubs and overhanging trees have been allowed to throw a graceful veil over man’s neglect. One strange sight the old monkish cells had witnessed earlier in the century. A man of liberal views had been elected Rector of the University. In his honour “the students made a bonfire at St. Leonard’s Gate, into which they threw some of the Calvinistic systems which they were enjoined to read.”[453] Not very many years before this innocent and even meritorious sacrifice was made, the terrible flames of religious persecution had blazed up in this city dedicated to piety and learning. It is possible that Johnson passed in the streets some aged man who in his childhood had seen a miserable woman burnt to death for witchcraft on the Witch Hill. So late as the seventh year of the present century a gentleman was living who had known a person who had witnessed this dreadful sight.[454]

In Dr. Watson’s house the two travellers “found very comfortable and genteel accommodation.” The host “wondered at Johnson’s total inattention to established manners;” but he does not seem to have let his wonder be discovered by his guest. “I take great delight in him,” said Johnson. How much delight Watson took in him we are not told. “He allowed him a very strong understanding;” and as well he might, for he heard some “good talk.” It was at his breakfast-table that Johnson proudly pointed out how authors had at length shaken themselves free of patrons. “Learning,” he said, “is a trade. We have done with patronage. If learning cannot support a man, if he must sit with his hands across till somebody feeds him, it is as to him a bad thing.” It was here, moreover, that he gave that amusing account of the change of manners in his lifetime. “I remember (said he) when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of.” That smoking had gone out seemed to him strange, for it was “a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity.”

BUCHANAN’S HOUSE.

The exact spot where he was so comfortably lodged is doubtful. In the Hebrides some of the chambers in which he slept are still known. In a University, where the traditions of a scholar should surely linger long, the very house has been forgotten. It is believed, however, that Dr. Watson occupied that part of the ancient building which had once been Buchanan’s residence. Some portion of that great scholar’s study still remains, having outlived both time and change. Yet that Johnson should not have been informed of a fact which to him would have been so interesting, or that being informed he should not have mentioned it, is indeed surprising. His admiration for Buchanan’s genius seems almost unbounded. If the city attracted him because it had once been archiepiscopal, so did the University, because in it Buchanan had once taught philosophy. “His name,” he adds, “has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits.” Sir Walter Scott loved him almost as much as Johnson. “He was his favourite Latin poet as well as historian.”[455]

Our travellers rose “much refreshed” from their fatigue, and to the enjoyment of a very fine day. They went forth to view the ruins not only of a cathedral, but almost of a city and a University. That it had once flourished as a city was shown by history: its ancient magnificence as the seat of a great archbishopric was witnessed by “the mournful memorials” which had escaped the hands of the devastator. Of its three Colleges only two were standing. It was “the skeleton of a venerable city,” said Smollett.[456] Many years earlier a traveller, applying to it Lord Rochester’s words, had described it as being “in its full perfection of decay.” Pennant, who visited it only the year before Johnson, on entering the West Port, saw a well-built street, straight, and of a vast length and breadth, lying before him; but it was so grass-grown, and so dreary a solitude, that it seemed as if it had been laid waste by pestilence.[457] Another traveller, who came a little later, praised “the noble wide street,” but lamented that most of the houses were “disfigured by what is termed a fore-stair—that is, an open staircase on the outside, carried in a zigzag manner across the front of the house.” Before most of them was heaped up a huge dunghill.[458] A young English student fresh from Eton, the grandson of Bishop Berkeley, who entered the University about the year 1778, on seeing “this dreary deserted city, wept to think that he was to remain there three long years.” So fond nevertheless did he become of the place that “he shed more tears at leaving than at entering.”[459] Saint-Fond saw grass growing in all the streets: “Tout y est triste, silencieux; le peuple, y vivant dans l’ignorance des arts et du commerce, offre l’image de l’insouciance et de la langueur.”[460] GRASS-GROWN STREETS. I was told by an old inhabitant that not a single new house was built till after the year 1851, and that not long before that time sheep might be seen feeding in the grass-grown streets. Our travellers were touched by the general gloom. “It was,” said Boswell, “somewhat dispiriting to see this ancient archiepiscopal city now sadly deserted.” “One of its streets,” wrote Johnson, “is now lost; and in those that remain there is the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation.” This loss of a street seems to have been imaginary. He was speaking, no doubt, of the road known under the name of The Scores, which runs in front of the Castle, and follows the line of the coast. But along its course neither pavements nor foundations have ever been discovered.[461] Nevertheless the desolation was very great. THE CASTLE. Over one ruin, however, a good man might have justly exulted. In the archbishops’ castle on the edge of the sea is shown the dreadful pit in which the unhappy prisoner, far below the level of the ground, spent his weary days in wretchedness and darkness, listening to the beating of the waves. Here ofttimes he waited for the hour to come when he should be raised by a rope to the surface, as if he were a bucket of water, and not a man, and dragged off to die before the people. Sometimes those poor eyes, grown weak by a darkness which was never broken, of a sudden had to face, not only the light of day, but the blaze of the torch which was to kindle the martyr’s pile. Thinking on all this—on Patrick Hamilton, on Henry Forrest, on George Wishart, and on Walter Milne, who for their faith suffered death by fire at St. Andrews—who does not rejoice that this dismal den was shattered to pieces, and that where once “an atheous priest” made the good tremble by his frown, now on the pleasant sward innocent children play about, and strangers from afar idly dream an hour away?

ST. ANDREWS CASTLE.
ST. ANDREWS.
DOCKS.

None of these thoughts came into the minds of the two travellers. They did not see this dreadful dungeon, for it was hidden beneath the rubbish of the ruined walls. The sight of it would, I hope, have moved Johnson to write otherwise than he did. Had he looked down into its gloomy depths, he would scarcely have said that “Cardinal Beaton was murdered by the ruffians of reformation.” Never surely was a more righteous sentence executed than that whereby this murderer of George Wishart, in the very room where, lolling on his velvet cushion, he had looked forth on the martyr’s sufferings, was himself put to death.

THE CATHEDRAL.