Or in the visit or the dance[168] to shine:
Thrice happy who succeed their mother’s praise,
The lovely Eglintounes of other days!’
It may be remarked that her ladyship’s thorough-paced Jacobitism, which she had inherited from her father, tended much to make her the friend of Ramsay, Hamilton, and other Cavalier bards. She was, it is believed, little given to patronising Whig poets.
The patriarchal peer who made Susanna so happy a mother died in 1729, leaving her a dowager of forty, with a good jointure. Retiring to the country, she employed her widowhood in the education of her children, and was considered a perfect example to all mothers in this useful employment. In our days of freer manners, her conduct might appear too reserved. The young were taught to address her by the phrase ‘Your ladyship;’ and she spoke to them in the same ceremonious style. Though her eldest son was a mere boy when he succeeded to the title, she constantly called him Lord Eglintoune; and she enjoined all the rest of the children to address him in the same manner. When the earl grew up, they were upon no less formal terms; and every day in the world he took his mother by the hand at the dinner-hour, and led her downstairs to her chair at the head of his table, where she sat in state, a perfect specimen of the stately and ostentatious politeness of the last age.
All this ceremony was accompanied with so much affection that the countess was never known to refuse her son a request but one—to walk as a peeress at the coronation of King George III. Lord Eglintoune, then a gentleman of the bedchamber, was proud of his mother, and wished to display her noble figure on that occasion. But she jestingly excused herself by saying that it was not worth while for so old a woman to buy new robes.
The unhappy fate of her eldest and favourite son—shot by a man of violent passions, whom he was rashly treating as a poacher (1769)—gave her ladyship a dreadful shock in her old age. The earl, after receiving the fatal wound, was brought to Eglintoune Castle, when his mother was immediately sent for from Auchans. What her feelings must have been when she saw one so dear to her thus suddenly struck down in the prime of his days may be imagined. The tenderness he displayed towards her and others in his last hours is said to have been to the last degree noble and affecting.
When Johnson and Boswell returned from their tour to the Hebrides, they visited Lady Eglintoune at Auchans. She was so well pleased with the doctor, his politics, and his conversation that she embraced and kissed him at parting, an honour of which the gifted tourist was ever afterwards extremely proud. Boswell’s account of the interview is interesting. ‘Lady Eglintoune,’ says he, ‘though she was now in her eighty-fifth year, and had lived in the country almost half a century, was still a very agreeable woman. Her figure was majestic, her manners high-bred, her reading extensive, and her conversation elegant. She had been the admiration of the gay circles, and the patroness of poets. Dr Johnson was delighted with his reception here. Her principles in church and state were congenial with his. In the course of conversation, it came out that Lady Eglintoune was married the year before Dr Johnson was born; upon which she graciously said to him that she might have been his mother, and she now adopted him.’
