The officers of the crown and the grandees of the kingdom assembled at the usual time to open her majesty’s will; but finding that the first lady of the queen’s chamber, who ought by virtue of her office to have been present, was absent, the august body sent a messenger, requesting her attendance. The first lady, deeming the message a gross attack upon her privileges and high importance, indignantly replied, that it was her indispensable duty not to leave her deceased royal mistress, and therefore the nobles must wait on her.
Thereupon ensued a negotiation by messages, which occupied eight hours. In the course of the discussion, the grandees insisted on their claims of precedence as an aggregate body, yet, individually, they considered themselves happy when complying with the commands of the ladies. Fixed in her resolution, the lady high-chamberlain acquainted her opponents with her final determination. The decision of the great officers and grandees was equally unalterable; but at the last they proposed, that “without rising from their seats, or moving themselves, they should be carried to a room at an equal distance between their own apartment and the lady high-chamberlain’s, who should be carried to the same place, seated upon a high cushion, in the same manner as she sat in the queen’s chamber, to the end it might be said, that neither side had made a step to meet each other.” It seems that the performance of the solemnity happily terminated the important difference.
BOSWELLIANA.
The following anecdotes are related by, or relate to, the well-known James Boswell, who conducted Dr. Johnson to the Highlands of Scotland.
It may be recollected that when Boswell took the doctor to his father’s house, the old laird of Auchinleck remarked, that “Jamie had brought an odd kind o’ a chiel’ wi’ him.” “Sir,” said Boswell, “he is the grand luminary of our hemisphere,—quite a constellation, sir.”—“Ursa Major, (the Great Bear,) I suppose,” said the laird.
Some snip-snap wit was wont to pass between sire and son. “Jamie” was bred an advocate, and sometimes pleaded at the bar. Pleading, on a particular occasion, before his father, who, at that time, was “Ordinary on the bills,” and saying something which his lordship did not like, he exclaimed to Jamie, “Ye’re an ass, mon.”—“No, my lord,” replied Jamie, “I am not an ass, but I am a colt, the foal of an ass!”
In 1785, Boswell addressed “a Letter to the People of Scotland” on a proposed alteration in the court of session. He says in this pamphlet, “When a man of probity and spirit, a lord Newhall, whose character is ably drawn in prose by the late lord president Arniston, and elegantly in verse by Mr. Hamilton of Bangour,—when such a man sits among our judges, should they be disposed to do wrong, he can make them hear and tremble. My honoured father told me, (the late lord Auchinleck,) that sir Walter Pringle ‘spoke as one having authority’—even when he was at the bar, ‘he would cram a decision down their throats.’”
Boswell tells, in the same “Letter,” that “Duncan Forbes of Culloden, when lord president of the court, gave every day as a toast at his table, ‘Here’s to every lord of session who does not deserve to be hanged!’ Lord Auchinleck and lord Monboddo, both judges, but since his time, are my authority,” says Boswell, “for this.—I do not say that the toast was very delicate, or even quite decent, but it may give some notion what sort of judges there may be.”