[Montrose, Laurencekirk and Monboddo (August 20-21).]

MONTROSE.

The road along which Johnson and Boswell drove as they journeyed from Dundee through Arbroath to Montrose, is described by Defoe as a “pleasant way through a country fruitful and bespangled, as the sky in a clear night with stars of the biggest magnitude, with gentlemen’s houses, thick as they can be supposed to stand with pleasure and conveniency.”[493] Our travellers in the latter part of the drive saw nothing of all this, for the sun had set before they left the great Abbey; it was not till eleven at night that they arrived at Montrose. There they found but a sorry inn, where, writes Boswell, “I myself saw another waiter put a lump of sugar with his fingers into Dr. Johnson’s lemonade, for which he called him ‘rascal!’ It put me in great glee that our landlord was an Englishman. I rallied the Doctor upon this and he grew quiet.” The town Johnson praised as “neat”—“neat” last century stood very high among the terms of commendation, though it is now supplanted by “elegant” among Americans, and by “nice” among English people. At the time of the Rebellion of 1745, the townsfolk had been described as “very genteel, but disaffected.”[494] To the clerk of the English chapel Johnson gave “a shilling extraordinary, saying, ‘He belongs to an honest church.’” He had the great merit also of keeping his church “clean to a degree unknown in any other part of Scotland,” so that his shilling was well earned.

GARDENSTON ARMS.

From Montrose the road led through a country rich with an abundant harvest that was almost ripe for the sickle, but bare of everything but crops. Even the hedges, said Johnson, were of stone. Boswell calls this a ludicrous description, but it could have been easily defended as good Scotch, for in the Scots Magazine for January of the previous year, we read of “the stone hedges of Scotland.”[495] It is strange that Johnson had not noticed these roughly-built walls in Northumberland, for in the northern part of that county, according to Pennant, “hedges were still in their infancy.”[496] LAURENCEKIRK. At Laurencekirk our travellers stopped to dine, and “respectfully remembered that great grammarian Ruddiman,” who had spent four years there as schoolmaster. More than seventy years before their visit, Dr. Pitcairne, the author of that Latin epitaph on Dundee which Dryden translated, being weather-bound at the village inn, “inquired if there were no persons who could interchange conversation and partake of his dinner.” The hostess mentioned Ruddiman. He came, pleased Pitcairne, and was by him brought to Edinburgh.[497] A VILLAGE LIBRARY. Francis Garden, one of the Scotch judges, under the title of Lord Gardenston, the laird and almost the founder of this thriving village, “had furnished the inn with a collection of books, that travellers might have entertainment for the mind as well as the body. Dr. Johnson praised the design, but wished there had been more books, and those better chosen.” The inn still stands with the library adjoining it. Round the room is hanging a series of portraits in French chalk of Gardenston’s “feuars,” or tenants, who, after the laird, were the chief people of the place when Johnson and Boswell passed through. Many of the books remain on the shelves, though some have been lost through carelessness or the dishonesty of travellers. There are among them a few works of light literature such as Dryden’s Virgil, and Gil Blas in French, but the solid reading which most of them afford makes us think with a feeling of respect that almost amounts to awe, of the learning of the Scotch travellers in those good old days. Tavern chairs were no thrones of human felicity in Laurencekirk if such works as the following were commonly perused by those who chanced to fill them:

In Marischal College, Aberdeen, there is a portrait of Lord Gardenston in his judge’s robes. He has a somewhat conceited look, such as we might expect in a man who “wrote a pamphlet upon his village, as if he had founded Thebes,” and who provided such improving reading for his weary fellow-creatures.

LORD MONBODDO.