[231] There is some account of him in Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, ed. 1825, ii. 173, and in Dr. A. Carlyle's Auto. p. 136.
[232] G. Chalmers (Life of Ruddiman, p. 270) says:—'In May, 1790, Lord Gardenston declared that he still intended to erect a proper monument in his village to the memory of the late learned and worthy Mr. Ruddiman.' In 1792 Gardenston, in his Miscellanies, p. 257, attacked Ruddiman. 'It has of late become fashionable,' he wrote, 'to speak of Ruddiman in terms of the highest respect.' The monument was never raised.
[233] A Letter to the Inhabitants of Laurence Kirk, by F. Garden.
[234] 'Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.' Hebrews xiii, 2.
[235] This, I find, is considered as obscure. I suppose Dr. Johnson meant, that I assiduously and earnestly recommended myself to some of the members, as in a canvass for an election into parliament. BOSWELL. See ante, ii, 235.
[236] Goldsmith in Retaliation, a few months later, wrote of William Burke:—'Would you ask for his merits? alas! he had none; What was good was spontaneous, his faults were his own.' See ante, iii 362, note 2.
[237] See ante, iii. 260, 390, 425.
[238] Hannah More (Memoirs, i. 252) wrote of Monboddo in 1782:—'He is such an extravagant adorer of the ancients, that he scarcely allows the English language to be capable of any excellence, still less the French. He said we moderns are entirely degenerated. I asked in what? "In everything," was his answer. He loves slavery upon principle. I asked him how he could vindicate such an enormity. He owned it was because Plutarch justified it. He is so wedded to system that, as Lord Barrington said to me the other day, rather than sacrifice his favourite opinion that men were born with tails, he would be contented to wear one himself.'
[239] Scott, in a note on Guy Mannering, ed. 1860, iv. 267, writes of Monboddo:—'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 coenaeque dear to all who, like the author (though then young), had the honour of sitting at his board.'
[240] Lord Cockburn, writing of the title that Jeffrey took when he was raised to the Bench in 1834, said:—'The Scotch Judges are styled Lords; a title to which long usage has associated feelings of reverence in the minds of the people, who could not now be soon made to respect or understand Mr. Justice. During its strongly feudalised condition, the landholders of Scotland, who were almost the sole judges, were really known only by the names of their estates. It was an insult, and in some parts of the country it is so still, to call a laird by his personal, instead of his territorial, title. But this assumption of two names, one official and one personal, and being addressed by the one and subscribing by the other, is wearing out, and will soon disappear entirely.' Cockburn's Jeffrey, i. 365. See post, p. 111, note 1.