Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)/Chapter 23
Glencroe, Loch Lomond, and Glasgow (October 26-30).
The Duke of Argyle, who had heard Dr. Johnson complain that the shelties were too small for his weight, "was obliging enough to mount him on a stately steed from his Grace's stable." Joseph (Boswell's servant), said: "He now looks like a bishop." Leaving Inverary on the morning of Tuesday, October 26, they rode round the head of Loch Fyne through Glencroe to Tarbet on Loch Lomond. Boswell, who was becoming somewhat indolent in keeping his journal, passes over this part of their tour in silence. Saint-Fond speaks of the Glen as "ce triste passage." Pennant describes it as "the seat of melancholy," and Johnson as "a black and dreary region. At the top of the hill," he adds, "is a seat with this inscription, 'Rest and be thankful.' Stones were placed to mark the distances, which the inhabitants have taken away, resolved, they said, to have no new miles." The road was that at which Wolfe's men had been working twenty years earlier.
"He that has gained at length the wished for height," still finds as Wordsworth many years later found "this brief, this simple wayside call," Rest and be Thankful; but there is no longer a seat where his weary limbs may repose. 
"REST AND BE THANKFUL." Perhaps some day it will be restored with the old inscription and the following addition:—"James Wolfe, 1753. Samuel Johnson, 1773. William Wordsworth, 1831." It is on a mile-stone, or on what looks like a mile-stone, that the inscription is now read. Beneath is carved.
Military Road Repd.
By 93d Regt. 1768.
Transferred To
Commrs For H. R. & B.[1]
In The Year 1814.
One of the earlier tablets, which were believed to have been put up by Wolfe's men, was pulled down many years ago by a farmer at Ardvoirlich, and transformed into a hearth stone.[2] Glencroe is but little changed since Johnson looked upon it. It is still lonely and grand. The tourist's carriage breaks the quiet from time to time, but it soon sinks back into "sublimity, silence and solitude." When we passed through it there was no succession of cataracts and no roaring torrent such as Johnson described. The long drought had made a silence in the hills. We met only one tourist—a lad on his bicycle who had escaped that morning from the smoke of Glasgow, and full of eagerness and life, was pressing on to the inn where his long ride of fifty miles would find its pleasant termination in dinner and a bed. I called to mind how seven and thirty years before when I was just such another youngster, as I was crossing the top of the Glen, I had seen in the distance something white fluttering in the wind. It was a big Highlander returning, as he told us, from Glasgow. Overcome by the heat of the day, and incommoded by a garment to which he was not much accustomed, he had taken off his trousers and was carrying them on his shoulders. It was his shirt that had caught my eye.
At Tarbet our travellers dined at the little inn on the bank of Loch Lomond. Here, a few years later, Saint-Fond and his party
Milestones on the Tarbet Road.
arrived very late on a rainy night in September. They were on their way from Glasgow to Inverary, and had meant to rest at Luss. Unfortunately for them it was the the time of the autumn circuit. The inn looked like a fisherman's hut. The landlady coming out made them a sign that they must not utter a sound. They were thrust into a stable, where she said:—"Le lord juge me fait l'honorable faveur dans sa tournée de loger chex moi; il est là; chacun doit respecter ce qu'il fait; il dort." She added that she could take in neither them nor their horses. They remonstrated, "Point de bruit, ne troublez pas le sommeil du juge, respect à la loi; soyez heureux et partez." They had no help for it, but drove on with their weary horses through the night and the heavy rain to Tarbet, where they arrived between three and four next morning. There they found all the beds occupied by jurymen, who were on their way to Inverary. The landlady did what she could to make them comfortable, and gave them some good tea in a set of China cups which had been given her by the Duchess of Argyle.[3]
At Stuckgown, close to Tarbet, Lord Jeffrey for many years passed a few weeks of every summer, in a quietness and solitude which have for ever fled the place. Writing from Tarbet on August 5, 1818, he says: "Here we are in a little inn on the banks of Loch
ROSEDEW.
Lomond, in the midst of the mists of the mountains, the lakes, heaths, rocks, and cascades which have been my passion since I was a boy, and to which, like a boy, I have run away the instant I could get my hands clear of law, and review, and Edinburgh. They have no post-horses in the Highlands, and we sent away those that brought us here, with orders to come back for us to morrow, and so we are left without a servant, entirely at the mercy of the natives." He goes on to mention a steam-boat "which circumnavigates the whole lake every day in about ten hours. It was certainly very strange and striking to hear and see it hissing and roaring past the headlands of our little bay, foaming and spouting like an angry whale; but on the whole it rather vulgarises the scene too much, and I am glad that it is found not to answer, and is to be dropped next year."[4] At Tarbet the tourist who is oppressed with the size of the hotel and the army of waiters, and who sees the pier as I saw it crowned with an automatic sweetmeat machine, may well wish that the steam-boat had never been found to answer. The scene is hopelessly vulgarised. It is fast sinking into the paradise of cockneys. I asked for that variety of bread which I remember to have seen served up there thirty-seven years ago. I was scornfully told that in those days the Scotch had not known how to bake, but that now they could make a large loaf as well as anyone. At Inverary I had in vain asked for oat-cakes at my hotel. If Johnson were to make his journey in these present times, and were confined to the big tourists' hotels, he would certainly no longer say that an epicure, wherever he had supped, would wish to breakfast in Scotland.
From Tarbet he rode along the shores of Loch Lomond to Rosedew,[5] the house of Sir James Colquhoun. 
INCH GALBRAITH. "It was a place," says the historian of Dumbartonshire, "rich in historic associations, but about 1770 it was superseded by a new mansion, to which large additions have since been made."[6] Here Boswell passed in review Johnson's courteous behaviour at Inverary, and said, "You were quite a fine gentleman when with the duchess.' He answered in good humour, 'Sir, I look upon myself as a very polite man.'" Next morning "we took," writes Johnson, "a boat to rove upon the lake. It has about thirty islands, of which twenty belong to Sir James. Young Colquhoun[7] went into the boat with us, but a little agitation of the water frighted him to shore. We passed up and down and landed upon one small island,[8] on which are the ruins of a castle; and upon another much larger, which serves Sir James for a park, and is remarkable for a large wood of yew trees." Just one hundred years later, on December 18, 1873, that very fate befel one of his descendants which the young Colquhoun dreaded for himself. In the darkness of a winter's evening his boat was upset as he was coming home from the Yew Island, and he was drowned with three of his gamekeepers and a boy. It was never known how the accident happened, for no one escaped; but the boat was heavily laden with the dead bodies of some stags, which they had shot in the island, and the unhappy men were weighed down with their accoutrements and the ammunition which they carried. The yew trees were planted, it was said, on the advice of King Robert Bruce, in order to furnish the Lennox men with
YEW TREE ISLAND.
trusty bows.[9] The old castle, "on which the osprey built her annual nest," is so much buried in ivy that it is not easily distinguished from the surrounding woods. We hired a boat at Luss and in our turn roved upon the lake. We landed on one of the islands and lunched on the top of a rock by the ruins of a second castle. Loch Lomond, studded with islands, lay like a mirror beneath us, with the huge Ben Lomond for a noble background. From time to time a boat broke the smoothness of the water, and the cry of a gull, or the bark of a far-away dog, the stillness of the air. We spoke of the heat and bustle of the world, but imagination almost refused to picture them in so peaceful a spot. Our boatman was a man of a strong mind, which had not been suffered to lie barren. He bore his part well in a talk on books. I had chanced to mention the serfs who worked in the coal-mines and salt-pans in Scotland; he at once struck into the conversation. "Sir Walter Scott," he said, "makes one of his characters say, 'he would not take him back like a collier on a salter.' This made me look the matter up for I did not understand what he meant." He praised the old Scotch common schools. "We Scotchmen," he proudly said, "have had education for three hundred years. A Scotch working-man would starve to death to give his son a good education." The present race of schoolmasters who are "paid by results," he contrasted unfavourably with those whom he had known in his boyhood. "The old Dominies would willingly teach all that they knew, and grudged no time to a boy who was eager for knowledge; but now they are like other people, and when they have done their day's work they will do no more." In the village club to which he belonged, they had in the last two or three winters engaged for a few weeks a young Glasgow student to teach them elocution, "for how could they enjoy Shakespeare if they did not know how to read him properly?" He praised the Colquhouns. "They would never send any of their tenants to prison for poaching. They might fine them, but the money they would give away in charity." He spoke of the old clan feeling, and of the protection given by the laird. His grandfather, who was a farmer, a Macpherson by name, had married a Macqueen.[10] On a rapid fall in the price of Highland cattle he fell into money difficulties, and was harshly threatened with a forced sale by one of his creditors. The Laird of the Macqueens said significantly to this man: "You may do whatever you like against Macpherson, but remember that his wife is a Macquecn." The hint was enough, and the proceedings were at once dropped. Our boatman had read Johnson's Journey lo the Western Islands, but said that Scotchmen feel too sore about him to like reading him. I opened the book, for I had it with me, and read the concluding words in which he says: "Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little." My boatman was much struck with his modesty, and seemed to think that he had formed too severe a judgment.
Boswell was not so careful in recording Johnson's talk on the Lake as I was with our boatman's. "I recollect," he writes, "none of his conversation, except that, when talking of dress, he said, 'Sir, were I to have any thing fine, it should be very fine. Were I to wear a ring, it should not be a bauble, but a stone of great value. Were I to wear a laced or embroidered waistcoat, it should be very rich. I had once a very rich laced waistcoat, which I wore the first night of my tragedy.'" Johnson, nearly five and twenty years before, sat in one of the side-boxes of Drury Lane Theatre, in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich gold lace, and a gold-
CAMERON.
laced hat, listening to the catcalls whistling before the curtain rose; how little could he have thought that one day he would boast of his costume as he was roving in a boat upon Loch Lomond!
In the evening they drove to Cameron, the seat of Commissary Smollett. It was the first drive which they had taken since at Inverness they began their equitation full two months earlier. "Our satisfaction," says Boswell, "of [sic] finding ourselves again in a comfortable carriage was very great. We had a pleasing conviction of the commodiousness of civilisation, and heartily laughed at the ravings of those absurd visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the superior advantages of a state of nature." With these visionaries Boswell himself sometimes sided. The people of Otaheite especially had won his admiration. "No, Sir;" said Johnson to him on one such occasion: "You are not to talk such paradox; let me have no more on't. It cannot entertain, far less can it instruct." "Don't cant in defence of savages," he said, on another occasion. At Cameron they had none of this fanciful talk. Their host "was a man of considerable learning, with abundance of animal spirits; so that he was a very good companion for Dr. Johnson, who said, 'We have had more solid talk here than at any place where we have been.'" He was a relation of the great novelist, and one of the four judges of the Commissary Court in Edinburgh. 
SMOLLET'S PILLAR. It was the sole court in Scotland which took cognisance of actions about marriage, and the Supreme Court in all questions of probate. "It sat," says the lively Topham, "in a little room of about ten feet square; from the darkness and dirtiness of it you would rather imagine that those who were brought into it were confined there." The judges were paid rather by perquisites than by salaries. In each cause they fixed the amount which the litigants should pay them for the sentence which they pronounced.[11]
Smollett, in his Humphry Clinker, brings Matthew Bramble and his nephew to Cameron, who describe it as "a very neat country house, but so embosomed in an oak wood that we did not see it till we were within fifty yards of the door." "If I was disposed to be critical," Mr. Bramble continues, "I should say it is too near the Lake, which approaches on one side to within six or seven yards of the window."[12] The Commissary had erected a pillar by the side of the high road to Glasgow, "to the memory of his ingenious kinsman," who two years earlier had died in Italy, "Eheu! quam procul a patria!" The Latin inscription for this monument was shown to Johnson, and revised by him "with an ardent and liberal earnestness." The copy with the corrections in his handwriting is preserved among the family papers at Cameron.[13]
On Thursday, October 28, a postchaise which Boswell had ordered from Glasgow, "came for us," he says, "and we drove on in high spirits." On their way they stopped at Dunbarton, then "a small but good old town, consisting principally of one large street in the form of a crescent;"[14] but now a smoky seat of the iron ship-building industry. The steep rock on which the Castle stands Johnson "ascended with alacrity." At Glasgow they stayed at the "Saracen's Head," "the paragon of inns in the eyes of the Scotch," says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, "but most wretchedly
DUNBARTON.
managed."[15] Our two travellers seem to have been contented. Johnson, no doubt, was kept in the best of humours by the sight of a great many letters from England, after the long interval of sixty-eight days during which not a line had reached him. "He enjoyed in imagination the comforts which we could now command, and seemed to be in high glee. I remember, he put a leg up on each side of the grate, and said, with a mock solemnity, by way of soliloquy, but loud enough for me to hear it: 'Here am I, an ENGLISH man, sitting by a coal fire.'" Of fires made by peat, that "sullen fuel," he had had enough in the last two months. All along the sea-board coal was made artificially dear by the folly of Parliament. A duty of five shillings and fourpence per chaldron, says Knox, was levied on coal at ports; none on inland coal. It had to be landed at a port where there is a custom-house, and might than be re-shipped for some other place in the neighbourhood.[16] Custom-houses were few and far between, so that in many cases, if coal was used at all, it would have had to be twice landed and twice shipped. On this mischievous regulation Adam Smith remarks: "Where coals are naturally cheap they are consumed duty free; where they are naturally dear, they are loaded with a heavy duty."[17]
The "Saracen's Head" with its coal fire has disappeared. My boatman had heard the old people talk of it. In this inn the following morning Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two of the other professors of the University breakfasted with Johnson. He met some of them also at dinner, tea, and supper. "I was not much pleased with any of them," he wrote to Mrs. Thrale. Boswell unfortunately was again lazy with his journal, and kept no record of the talk. Writing long afterwards, he says: "The general impression upon my memory is, that we had not much conversation at Glasgow, where the professors, like their brethren at Aberdeen, did not venture to expose themselves much to the battery of cannon which they knew might play upon them." Reid's silence was perhaps merely due to that reserve which he generally shewed among strangers.[18] Had fate been kinder, the great Clow might have been still among them, who twenty-two years before had been preferred both to Hume and Burke as Adam Smith's successor in the Chair of Logic.[19] The story of the Billingsgate altercation between Smith and Johnson, recorded by Sir Walter Scott, is wholly untrue. Smith was not at this time in Glasgow. It is, no doubt, one of those tales about Johnson in which Scotch invention was humorously displayed. It was, perhaps, meant as a reply to the question which one day, in London, he put to Adam Smith, who was boasting of Glasgow, "Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?" Boswell says: "I put him in mind of it to-day while he expressed his admiration of the elegant buildings, and whispered him, 'Don't you feel some remorse?' 'Smith's pride in the city where he had spent more than three years as a student, and twelve as a professor, was assuredly well-founded. Johnson calls it "opulent and handsome," and Boswell "beautiful." Nearly two centuries earlier Camden had said that "for pleasant situation, apple-trees, and other like fruit-trees, it is much commended."[20] Defoe describes it as "indeed a very fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together. It is the cleanest, and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted."[21] Another traveller of about the same date says that "it is the beautifullest little city he had seen in Britain. It stands deliciously on the banks of the River Clyde."[22] In June, 1757, John Wesley went up to the top of the cathedral steeple. "It gave us a fine prospect," he writes, "both of the city and the adjacent country. A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in England."[23] Smollett swells the general chorus of praise: "Glasgow is the pride of Scotland. It is one of the prettiest towns in Europe."[24] Pennant, who visited it the year before Johnson, calls it "the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw. The view from the Cross has an air of vast magnificence."[25]
At the Rebellion of 1745 the citizens had shown the greatest loyalty. They raised and supported at their own expense two battalions of six hundred men each, who joined the duke's army. Their town was occupied by the Pretender's forces, who for ten days lived there at free quarters. They had had to pay, moreover, two heavy fines, amounting to more than nine thousand pounds, imposed on them for their fidelity to the Hanoverian Family. In 1749, in answer to their petition for relief, they received a grant from Parliament of ten thousand pounds.[26] On April 24 of that same year a stage-coach began to run between Glasgow and Edinburgh, starting from Edinburgh every Monday and Thursday, and from Glasgow every Tuesday and Friday. "Every person pays nine shillings fare, and is allowed a stone-weight of luggage."[27] By the year 1783 far greater facilities were afforded. In John Tait's Directory for Glasgow of that year (p. 77) it is announced that "three machines set out from each town every day at eight morning. They stop on the road and change horses. Tickets, 10s. 6d. each." There was another daily "machine" belonging to a different set of proprietors, besides one which ran only three times a week, and charged but 8s. 6d. "The Carlisle Diligence," it is announced, "sets out every lawful day."
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. How far removed from us are those days when Glasgow was pillaged by the wild rabble of Highlanders! Yet I have an uncle[28] still living who remembers his grandfather and his grandfather's brother, one of whom had climbed up a tree to see the other march with a body of Worcestershire volunteers against the Young Pretender.
Johnson, after seeing the sights of the city, visited the college. "It has not had," he writes, "a sufficient share of the increasing magnificence of the place." From the account which Dr. Alexander Carlyle gives of the citizens, as he had known them about thirty years earlier, they were not likely to trouble themselves much about the glory of their University. With a few exceptions they were "shopkeepers and mechanics, or successful pedlars, who occupied large warerooms full of manufactures of all sorts to furnish a cargo to Virginia In those accomplishments and that taste that belong to people of opulence, much more to persons of education, they were far behind the citizens of Edinburgh." There was not a teacher of French or of music in the whole town. Nevertheless, in the University itself he found "learning an object of more importance, and the habit of application much more general" than in the rival institution in the capital.[29] Wesley compared the two squares which formed the college with the small quadrangles of Lincoln College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow, and did not think them larger, or at all handsomer. He was surprised at the dress of the students. "They wear scarlet gowns, reaching only to their knees. Most I saw were very dirty, some very ragged, and all of very coarse cloth."[30] How much more surprised would he have been at the far shorter gowns now worn by the commoners in his own university, showing, as they do, a raggedness which is not the effect of age and wear, but of intentional mutilation! There is an affectation of antiquity quite as much in a freshman's gown, as in the pedigree of some upstart who boasts that he is sprung from the Plantagenets. The college numbered at this time about four hundred students, most of whom lived in lodgings, but some boarded with the professors."[31]
The principal was Dr. Leechman, whose sermon on prayer had once raised a storm "among the high-flying clergy."[32]
"In his house Dr. Johnson had the satisfaction of being told that his name had been gratefully celebrated in one of the parochial congregations in the Highlands, as the person to whose influence it was chiefly owing that the New Testament was allowed to be translated into the Erse language. It seems some political members of the Society in Scotland for propagating Christian Knowledge had opposed this pious undertaking, as tending to preserve the distinction between the Highlanders and Lowlanders."
Johnson, in a letter full of generous indignation, had maintained that "he that voluntarily continues ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces," and had compared these political Christians to the planters of America, "a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble."[33] Though he was no doubt struck by Leechman's appearance, "which was that of an ascetic, reduced by fasting and prayer," yet in his talk he could have had no pleasure. "He was not able to carry on common conversation, and when he spoke at all, it was a short lecture." The young students who were invited to his house, longed to be summoned from the library to tea in the drawing-room, where his wife "maintained a continued conversation on plays, novels, poetry, and the fashions."[34]
- ↑ Commissioners for Highland Roads and Bridges.
- ↑ Wright's Life of General Wolfe, p. 269.
- ↑ Voyage en Angleterre, &c, i. 268.
- ↑ Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, ed. 1852, ii. 180.
- ↑ Rossdhu.
- ↑ J. Irving's Book of Dumbartonshire, ii. 242. See ib. p. 257, where it is stated that it was in 1774 (the year after Johnson's visit), that "a removal was made from the old castle to the centre portion."
- ↑ Johnson spells the name as it was pronounced Cohune.
- ↑ Inch Galbraith.
- ↑ Irving's Book of Dumbartonshire, i. 347.
- ↑ I have intentionally altered the names.
- ↑ Topham's Letters from Edinburgh, p. 299, and Arnot's History of Edinburgh, p. 491.
- ↑ Humphry Clinker, iii. 17, 39.
- ↑ Irving's Book of Dumbartonshire, ii. 200.
- ↑ Pennant's Tour in Scotland, ed. 1774, i. 228.
- ↑ Gentleman's Magazine, 1771, p. 545.
- ↑ Knox's Tour, pp. cli–iii.
- ↑ Wealth of Nations, ed. 1811, iii. 335.
- ↑ Tytler's Life of Lord Kames, ii. 230.
- ↑ Burton's Life of Hume, i. 351.
- ↑ Camden's Description of Scotland, 2nd ed. p. 81.
- ↑ Defoe's Tour through Great Britain: Scotland, p. 83.
- ↑ J. Macky's Journey through Scotland, ed. 1723, p. 295.
- ↑ Wesley's Journal, ii. 410.
- ↑ Humphry Clinker, iii. 14, 33.
- ↑ Voyage to the Hebrides, ed. 1774, p. 127.
- ↑ Scots Magazine, 1749, p. 202.
- ↑ Scots Magazine, 1749, p. 253.
- ↑ Mr. Frederic Hill, late Assistant-Secretary to the Post Office.
- ↑ Dr. A. Carlyle's Autobiography, pp. 71, 74.
- ↑ Wesley's Journal, ii. 286.
- ↑ Pennant's Voyage to the Hebrides, ed. 1774, p. 136.
- ↑ Dr. A. Carlyle's Autobiography, p. 69, and Johnson's Boswell, v. 68.
- ↑ Boswell's Johnson, ii. 27.
- ↑ Dr. A. Carlyle's Autobiography, pp. 68, 83.