George Birkbeck Norman Hill

“ I was sorry to see in many places that ivy in the true cockney spirit has been trained up the ruins. Unless the strong sea-breezes, which cut off the tops of the trees as soon as they show their heads too high, come to the rescue, it will in time hide the dark red sandstone beneath a uniform mantle of green. Though the ruins are now cared for, and the ground cleared of the long grass and weeds which hindered Johnson from tracing the foundations, nevertheless the lofty wall close to the main entrance is disgraced by huge advertisements. ”

“ No “splendid dinner” is served up in it such as Johnson enjoyed and praised; no “luxuries” such as he defended. No Lady Betty Hamilton can quietly take her chair after dinner, and lean upon the back of it, as she listens eagerly to the great talker, who is unaware that she is just behind him. No Boswell can with a steady countenance have the satisfaction for once to look a duchess in the face, as with a respectful air he drinks to her good health. ”

“ The old house in which he had taken shelter for one night, and where Boswell and Johnson were so hospitably received, where they heard from their hostess the strange story of her adventures—this interesting old house no longer exists. Some of the trees which surround the modern residence must be old enough to have seen not only our two travellers, but also the fugitive Prince. As we looked upon it from the opposite shore of the narrow loch it seemed a pleasant spot, nearly facing the west, sheltered from the east by hills, and embosomed in trees, with meadows in front sloping down to the sea. ”

“ As we wander among these ancient ruins it is pleasant to think not only on the days when the cathedral stood in all its magnificence, and on those other days when the wild mob raved through it, but also on old Samuel Johnson, wrapped up in contemplation or preaching about retirement, and on Walter Scott resting on a{97} gravestone and dreaming of his first love. We may pause, too, for one moment in the old chapel beneath the tower, at the spot where that good man and good antiquary Robert Chambers lies in everlasting rest. ”

“ More than one caller, as he gazed on the huge frame, the scarred face, and the awkward strange movements of the man of whom they had heard so much, might have exclaimed with Lord Elibank, that “hardly anything seemed more improbable than to see Dr. Johnson in Scotland.” What Edinburgh said and thought of him we should greatly like to know. But no letters recording his visit seem to be extant. Even the very house has disappeared. Time, which has spared everything else in this old Court, has not spared it. ”

“ As we gaze on the filthy river which runs by the large city, on the dense cloud of smoke which hangs over it, on the grimy streets which have swallowed up the country far and wide, while we exult in the display of man’s ingenuity and strength, and in the commerce by which the good things of earth are so swiftly and cheaply interchanged, we may mourn over the beautiful little town among the apple-trees which stood so deliciously on the banks of the fair and pure stream that ran to seawards beneath the arches of the old stone bridge. ”

“ And the main street so broad and finely paved, with the lofty houses on either hand (many of them seven or eight stories high) is far beyond any in Great Britain. But how can it be suffered that all manner of filth should still be thrown, even into this street, continually? Where are the Magistracy, the Gentry, the Nobility of the Land? Have they no concern for the honour of their nation? How long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea and the chief street of it, stink worse than a common sewer?” [263] ”

“ Old Lochbuy does not seem to have been a bad fellow, though he was slow in learning that he had lost his right to imprison his tenants. “May not a man do what he likes with his own?” we can fancy him asking in the words used more than seventy years later by an English duke. Much as his descendant has done, there is one thing more which I would ask him to do. He dreads, no doubt, the throng of noisy tourists, but he might surely build a modest inn where the pensive wanderer could find lodging, and enjoy the scenery of Lochbuy. ”

“ The modern traveller who, as he passes through the Lothians or Aberdeenshire, looks with admiration on farming in its perfection, would learn with astonishment how backward Scotch agriculture was little more than one hundred years ago. While in England men of high rank and strong minds were ambitious of shining in the characters of farmers, in Scotland it was looked upon as a pursuit far beneath the attention of a gentleman. ”

“ At Talisker Johnson made the acquaintance of young Macleane of Col, that amiable man whose death by drowning the following year he so much lamented. Under his guidance, taking leave of their kind hosts, they rode across the island to Sconser, on the coast opposite to Raasay. Of this part of their journey they tell us next to nothing, though they passed through the wildest scenery. For the first two or three miles their path wound up a valley that is not unworthy of the most delightful parts of Cumberland. It is altogether free from the utter desolation which casts a gloom over so much of Skye. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ THE CATHEDRAL.
With far different feelings are we animated as we look at “the poor remains of the stately Cathedral.” If we do not grieve for the rooks, nevertheless we mourn over the wild folly which struck down so glorious a rookery. Would that that fair sight still caught the sailor’s eye which met John Knox’s gaze when, “hanging tired over his oar in the French galley, he saw the white steeples of St. Andrews rising out of the sea in the mist of the summer morning!” [462] Desolate as is the scene of ruin now, it was far more desolate when Johnson saw it. The ground lay deep in rubbish. ”

“ Nevertheless we are at no loss to picture to ourselves the home of Hume and Boswell. Their land occupied one half of the northern side of the Court; the other half, which no doubt corresponded with it in almost every respect, happily escaped the flames. It is so solidly built that if it is spared by the rage of fire and of modern improvement, it has little to fear from time. Its situation, looking down as it does with its northern front on the Mound, and the pleasant gardens in the valley below, has kept it from sinking in public estimation so much as most of the neighbouring buildings. ”

“ THE CASTLE. Over one ruin, however, a good man might have justly exulted. In the archbishops’ castle on the edge of the sea is shown the dreadful pit in which the unhappy prisoner, far below the level of the ground, spent his weary days in wretchedness and darkness, listening to the beating of the waves. Here ofttimes he waited for the hour to come when he should be raised by a rope to the surface, as if he were a bucket of water, and not a man, and dragged off to die before the people. ”

“ In philosophy, in history, in law, in science, in poetry, in romance, in the arts of life, in trade, in government, in war, in the spread of our dominions, in the consolidation of our Empire, glorious has been the part which Scotland has played. ”

“ There was indeed that general diffusion of learning which was conspicuously wanting in England. An English traveller noticed with surprise how rare it was to find “a man of any rank but the lowest who had not some tincture of learning. It was the pride and delight of every father to give his son a liberal education.” [342] Nevertheless it had been “with their learning as with provisions in a besieged town, every man had a mouthful and no one a bellyful.” [343] That there was a foundation for Johnson’s pointed saying was many years later candidly admitted by Sir Walter Scott. ”

“ The French writer, Faujas de Saint Fond, who visited the Highlands about the year 1780, was touched with the same unromantic gloom. When on his way from the barren mountains of the north he reached the fertile southern shore of Loch Tay, and caught the first glimpse of the change to happier climes, his soul experienced as sweet a joy as is given by the first breath of spring. ”

“ In a fisherman’s boat we rowed down the loch, sometimes in mid-channel and sometimes skirting the cliffs, which rose like a wall of rock to a great height above us. We passed little islets, and the mouths of caverns which filled with clouds of spray as the long rolling waves swept in from the Atlantic. On the ledges of the rocks, hovering over our heads, swimming and diving in the sea, were cormorants, puffins, oyster catchers, gulls, curlews and guillemots. ”

“ To Boswell Johnson had quickly become attached. “Give me your hand,” he said to him in the first weeks of their acquaintance, “I have taken a liking to you.” A month or so later he added, “There are few people to whom I take so much as to you.” But Lord Auchinleck, though he might have respected he never could have liked. No men were more unlike in everything but personal appearance, than Boswell and his father. The old man had none of that “facility of manners,” of which, according to Adam Smith, the son “was happily possessed.” ”

“ MONBODDO.
The “farmer’s dinner” was good enough to satisfy Dr. Johnson, for he made a very hearty meal. Yet with all the pride of a man who has a vigorous appetite, he said, “I have done greater feats with my knife than this.” The low, square, panelled room in which they dined is much as they saw it, with its three windows with deep recesses looking on to the lawns and trees. It is a solid, comfortable apartment, which might have recalled to Johnson’s memory an Oxford Common-Room, and which harmonized well with the solid talk he had with his host. ”

“ There were woods and flowering shrubs, rhododendrons and the Portugal laurel, and close to the water’s edge the laburnum in full bloom. There were all the sights of peaceful country life—the cocks crowing, the sheep answering with their bleats their bleating lambs, the cows with their calves in the noonday heat seeking the shade of the tall and wide-spreading trees. The waves lapped gently on the shore, and in the distance, below the rocky coast of Skye, the waters were whitened by the countless sea-birds. ”

“ At the head of the loch are two beautiful bays, each with its pastures and tilled lands, its low-wooded heights and its lofty circling mountains, each facing the south-west and sheltered from the cold winds. Between these two bays rise fine crags, hidden in places beneath hazels and ivy. For most of the year it is a land streaming with waterfalls. In beautiful ravines, half hidden by the trees, wild cascades rush down, swollen by the storms that have burst on the mountains; but at the time of my visit their voice was hushed by the long drought. ”

“ KIRKALDY. Three miles beyond Kinghorn they drove through Kirkaldy, “a very long town, meanly built,” where Adam Smith perhaps at that very time was taking his one amusement, “a long, solitary walk by the sea-side,” smiling and talking to himself and meditating his Wealth of Nations. [444] Here, too, Thomas Carlyle was to have “will and waygate” upon all his friend Irving’s books, and here “with greedy velocity” he was to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at the rate of a volume a day. ”

“ Macaulay,” writes Johnson, “we visited Cawdor Castle, from which Macbeth drew his second title.” That they should have needed a direction to visit so beautiful a spot seems strange, for they must have passed close by it on their way to the manse. As I first caught sight of it by the light of a summer evening, I thought that I had rarely seen a fairer spot. This castle hath indeed a pleasant seat, I said. All the barrenness of the eastern coast I had left behind me, and had found in its stead a luxuriance of growth that would have graced the oldest mansion in England. ”

“ What pilgrimages have not men made from the other side of the Atlantic to the same spots! With their Boswell in their hands they have wandered by Charing Cross, “with its full tide of human existence;” up the Strand, “through the greatest series of shops in the world;” under Temple Bar, where Johnson’s and Goldsmith’s names did not mingle with those of the Scotch rebels [813] ; along Fleet Street, with “its very animated appearance,” to the courts and lanes and taverns where the spirits of the men who gathered round the great Lexicographer seem still to linger. ”

“ We were now treading that illustrious Island, which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. ”

“ If no nobler monuments can be raised, surely some bronze tablet or graven stone might keep fresh the memory of the spot where Adam Smith had his chamber, where Benjamin Franklin came to visit David Hume, where Rousseau was offered a shelter, and where James Boswell’s guests were Pascal Paoli and Samuel Johnson. ”

“ By the kindness of the Earl of Cawdor I was allowed to go over the castle from turret almost to foundation-stone at a time when it was not generally open.
“The old tower,” says Boswell, “must be of great antiquity. There is a draw-bridge—what has been a moat—and an ancient court. There is a hawthorn-tree, which rises like a wooden pillar through the rooms of the castle; for, by a strange conceit, the walls have been built round it. ”

“ It must never be forgotten that in this Union England was no less blessed than Scotland; that if she gave wealth to Scotland, Scotland nobly repaid the gift in men. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English stock had been quickened and strengthened and ennobled by fugitives seeking refuge on her shores from the persecutions of priests and kings, which passed over the coward and the base, and fell only on the brave and the upright. ”

“ In all the cities of Scotland there were craftsmen, but it was in Glasgow alone that they rose to save their beloved Cathedral. Yet everywhere the people should have felt—to use Johnson’s homely words—as, “wrapt up in contemplation,” he surveyed these scenes—that “differing from a man in doctrine is no reason why you should pull his house about his ears.” We may exclaim, as Wesley exclaimed at Aberbrothick, when he was told that the zealous reformers burnt the Abbey down, “God deliver us from reforming mobs!” ”

“ The dungeons and the pit are not described by either Boswell or Johnson, though the sight of them, we would willingly believe, must have roused their indignation. In these old castles there are few things more shocking than the close neighbourhood of festivity and misery. It shows a callousness to human suffering which almost passes belief. If a prisoner is in a remote part of a great castle, the imagination then must come into play to bring his sufferings before the mind ”