A mile or two off the road from Laurencekirk to Aberdeen lived the famous old Scotch judge, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. “I knew,” wrote Boswell, “that he and Dr. Johnson did not love each other; yet I was unwilling not to visit his Lordship, and was also curious to see them together. I mentioned my doubts to Dr. Johnson, who said he would go two miles out of his way to see Lord Monboddo.” The two men had not much in common except their love of learning, and their precision of speech. Monboddo, according to Foote, was an Elzevir edition of Johnson. In a letter to Mrs. Thrale Johnson thus describes him:
“He has lately written a strange book about the origin of language, in which he traces monkeys up to men, and says that in some countries the human species have tails like other beasts. He inquired for these long-tailed men of Banks, and was not well-pleased that they had not been found in all his peregrinations. He talked nothing of this to me, and I hope we parted friends; for we agreed pretty well, only we disputed in adjusting the claims of merit between a shopkeeper of London and a savage of the American wildernesses. Our opinions were, I think, maintained on both sides without full conviction; Monboddo declared boldly for the savage, and I perhaps for that reason sided with the citizen.”
Johnson a few years earlier had contrasted Monboddo with Rousseau, “who talked nonsense so well that he must know he was talking nonsense;” whereas, he added, “chuckling and laughing, ‘I am afraid Monboddo does not know that he is talking nonsense.’” He was undoubtedly a man of great learning, but he was almost destitute of the critical faculty. In the six volumes of his Ancient Metaphysics we come across such strange passages as the following:
“Not only are there tailed men extant, but men such as the ancients describe Satyrs have been found, who had not only tails, but the feet of goats, and horns on their heads.... We have the authority of a father of the Church for a greater singularity of the human form, and that is of men without heads but with eyes in their breasts.... There is another singularity as great or greater than any I have hitherto mentioned, and that is of men with the heads of dogs.”[499]
After stating his readiness to believe that “a tame and gentle animal” once existed, “having the head of a man and the body of a lion,” he continues:
“The variety of nature is so great that I am convinced of the truth of what Aristotle says, that everything exists, or did at some time exist, which is possible to exist.”[500]
The orang-outang he describes as being “of a character mild and gentle, affectionate, too, and capable of friendship, with the sense also of what is decent and becoming.”[501] The ancients, he stoutly maintained, were in every respect better and stronger than their descendants. He shocked Hannah More by telling her that “he loved slavery upon principle.” When she asked him “how he could vindicate such an enormity, he owned it was because Plutarch justified it.”[502] In one respect he was wise in following the example of the ancients. In an age when bathing was very uncommon even among the wealthy, he constantly urged the daily use of the cold bath. He reminded “our fine gentlemen and ladies that the Otaheite man, Omai, who came from a country where the inhabitants bathed twice a day,” complained of the offensive smell of all the people of England.[503] It was believed, however, that Monboddo impaired the health of his children by the hardy treatment to which he exposed them. He despised Johnson because “he had compiled a dictionary of a barbarous language, a work which a man of real genius rather than undertake would choose to die of hunger.”[504] In the latter part of his life he used every year to pay a visit to London, and he always went on horseback, even after he had passed his eightieth year. “A carriage, a vehicle that was not in common use among the ancients, he considered as an engine of effeminacy and sloth. To be dragged at the tail of horses seemed in his eyes to be a ludicrous degradation of the genuine dignity of human nature. In Court he never sat on the Bench with the other judges, but within the Bar, on the seat appropriated for Peers.”[505] Yet with all his singularities he was a fine old fellow. There was no kinder landlord in all Scotland. While around him the small farms were disappearing, and farmers and cottagers were making room for sheep, it was his boast that on his estate no change had been made. Neither he nor his father before him had ever turned off a single cottager.
“One of my tenants (he wrote) who pays me no more than £30 of rent has no less than thirteen cottagers living upon his farm. I have on one part of my estate seven tenants, each of whom possesses no more than three acres of arable land, and some moorish land for pasture, and they pay me no more than twelve shillings for each acre, and nothing for the moor. I am persuaded I could more than double the rent of their land by letting it off to one tenant; but I should be sorry to increase my rent by depopulating any part of the country; and I keep these small tenants as a monument of the way in which I believe a great part of the Lowlands was cultivated in ancient times.”[506]
He befriended Burns, who repaid his kindness by celebrating his daughter’s beauty in his Address to Edinburgh, and by the elegy which he wrote on her untimely death. In a note to Guy Mannering Sir Walter Scott describes his supper parties, “where there was a circulation of excellent Bordeaux in flasks garlanded with roses, which were also strewed on the table after the manner of Horace. The best society, whether in respect of rank or literary distinction, was always to be found in St. John’s Street, Canongate. The conversation of the excellent old man; his high, gentleman-like, chivalrous spirit; the learning and wit with which he defended his fanciful paradoxes; the kind and liberal spirit of his hospitality, must render these noctes cænæque dear to all who, like the author (though then young), had the honour of sitting at his board.”
MONBODDO HOUSE.