In the drawing-room was hanging that fine whole-length picture of Lord Errol, which led Johnson to talk of his friend, the great painter, and “to conclude his panegyric by saying, ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds, sir, is the most invulnerable man I know; the man with whom if you should quarrel, you would find the most difficulty how to abuse.’”
In the rebellion of 1745, Lord Errol, following a plan not unknown among the Scotch nobility, had served on the opposite side from his father. At Culloden he had seen him brought in prisoner. “The Earl of Kilmarnock had lost his hat, and his long hair was flying over his face. The son stepped out of the ranks, and taking off his own hat placed it over his father’s disordered and wind-beaten locks.”[538] The young man in his loyalty to George II., did not follow the example of his forefathers, for he was descended from at least three lines of rebels. “He united in his person the four earldoms of Errol, Kilmarnock, Linlithgow, and Callander.” The last two were attainted in 1715, and Kilmarnock in 1746.[539] As we gaze at the haughty-looking man whom Reynolds has so finely painted in the robes of a peer, we call to mind the coronation of George III., where he played his part as High Constable of Scotland—“the noblest figure I ever saw,” wrote Horace Walpole.[540] To Johnson he recalled Homer’s character of Sarpedon.[541] At the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, Walpole thought, as well he might, on that “most melancholy scene” which he had witnessed less than fifteen years before in that same hall, when the earl’s father, “tall and slender, his behaviour a most just mixture between dignity and submission,” had in vain pleaded for mercy.[542]
THE BULLERS OF BUCHAN.
THE BULLERS OF BUCHAN.
From Slains Castle our travellers drove a short distance along the coast to the famous Bullers of Buchan—“a sight,” writes Johnson, “which no man can see with indifference, who has either sense of danger or delight in rarity.” Boswell describes the spot as:—
“A circular basin of large extent, surrounded with tremendous rocks. On the quarter next the sea, there is a high arch in the rock, which the force of the tempest has driven out. This place is called Buchan’s Buller, or the Buller of Buchan, and the country people call it the Pot. Mr. Boyd said it was so called from the French bouloir.[543] It may be more simply traced from boiler in our own language. We walked round this monstrous cauldron. In some places the rock is very narrow; and on each side there is a sea deep enough for a man-of-war to ride in; so that it is somewhat horrid to move along. However, there is earth and grass upon the rock, and a kind of road marked out by the print of feet; so that one makes it out pretty safely: yet it alarmed me to see Dr. Johnson striding irregularly along.”
As the weather was calm they took a boat and rowed through the archway into the cauldron. “It was a place,” writes Johnson, “which, though we could not think ourselves in danger, we could scarcely survey without some recoil of mind.” He thought that “it might have served as a shelter from storms to the little vessels used by the northern rovers.” Sir Walter Scott, however, was told that this was impossible, for “in a high gale the waves rush in with incredible violence. An old fisher said he had seen them flying over the natural wall of the Bullers, which cannot be less than two hundred feet high.”[544] In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1755 (p. 200), two strange pictures are given of this curious place, which must surely have been drawn in St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, by an artist who had never seen it.
DUN BUY.
Not far off is Dun Buy,[545] a lofty island rock placed in an angle of the shore that is formed by no less lofty cliffs. The sea, with its dark waters in endless rise and fall, washes through the narrow channel, its ceaseless murmur answering to the cries of the countless water-fowl who high up on the ledges breed in safety. On one side, where there is a steep, grassy slope, Dun Buy can be scaled. I climbed up it many years ago one hot summer’s day, and thought that I had never seen so strange and wild a spot. Johnson had also visited it, but his mind was not affected as was my young imagination, for he said that “upon these rocks there was nothing that could long detain attention.”