ELGIN CATHEDRAL.
CATHEDRALS IN RUINS.
The noble ruins of the great cathedral Johnson examined with a most patient attention, though the rain was falling fast. “They afforded him another proof of the waste of reformation.” His indignation was excited even more than by the ruins at St. Andrew’s; for “the cathedral was not destroyed by the tumultuous violence of Knox, but suffered to dilapidate by deliberate robbery and frigid indifference.” By an order of Council the lead had been stripped off the roof and shipped to be sold in Holland. “I hope,” adds Johnson, “every reader will rejoice that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea.” On this passage Horace Walpole remarks in a letter to Lord Hailes:—“I confess I have not quite so heinous an idea of sacrilege as Dr. Johnson. Of all kinds of robbery that appears to me the lightest species which injures nobody. Dr. Johnson is so pious, that in his journey to your country he flatters himself that all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church. I doubt that uncharitable anathema is more in the spirit of the Old Testament than of the New.”[552] While Johnson censured the frigid indifference of the Scotch, he did not forget the ruin that was being slowly worked in England by the avarice and neglect of deans and canons. “Let us not,” he wrote, “make too much haste to despise our neighbours. Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation. It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence, and we are in danger of doing that deliberately which the Scots did not do but in the unsettled state of an imperfect constitution.” He had learnt, there seems good reason to believe, that the chapter of the cathedral of his own town of Lichfield intended to strip the lead off its roof and cover it instead with slate. As he had first printed his narrative he had much more closely pointed the attack. It had run as follows: “There is now, as I have heard, a body of men not less decent or virtuous than the Scottish council, longing to melt the lead of an English cathedral. What they shall melt, it were just that they should swallow.” Before publication he had the leaf cancelled, from the tender recollection that the dean had done him a kindness about forty years before. “He is now very old, and I am not young. Reproach can do him no good, and in myself I know not whether it is zeal or wantonness.”[553]
FORES.
As I turned away from the ruins with my thoughts full of the past—of the ancient glory of the cathedral, of the strange sights which had been seen from its tower when the Young Pretender’s Highlanders hurried by, closely followed by the English army, of old Johnson wandering about in the heavy rain—I was suddenly reminded of the vastness of “the abysm of time” by which they are separated from us, by reading in an advertisement placarded on the walls, that for £3 16s. 5d. could be had a ticket from Elgin to Paris and back.
[Nairn and Cawdor (August 27-28).]
THE ROYAL BURGH OF NAIRN.
Leaving Elgin that same afternoon, our travellers drove on to Fores, where they passed the night. Next morning, continuing their journey early, they breakfasted at Nairn. “Though a county town and a royal burgh, it is,” writes Boswell, “a miserable place.” Johnson also describes it as being “in a state of miserable decay.” Nevertheless, “the chief annual magistrate,” he says, “is styled Lord Provost.” If it sank as a royal burgh, it has raised its head again as a popular bathing-place. In this respect it has not its rival, I was told, in the north of Scotland. Here Johnson “fixed the verge of the Highlands; for here he first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse language.”[554] Over the room in the inn where he and Boswell sat “a girl was spinning wool with a great wheel, and singing an Erse song.” It was thirty years later that Wordsworth in like manner heard “The Solitary Reaper”: