rianism to such a height, that once, when a countryman came in to state some justice business, and being required to make his oath, declined to do so before his lordship, because he was not a covenanted magistrate—'Is that a' your objection, mon?' said the judge: 'come your ways in here, and we'll baith of us tak the solemn league and covenant together.' The oath was accordingly agreed and sworn to by both, and I dare say it was the last time it ever received such homage."[1] He would have nothing to do with clearing his tongue of Scotticisms, or with smoothing and rounding his periods on the model of the English classical authors. "His Scotch was broad and vulgar."[2] In one thing at all events he was sure of receiving Johnson's warm approval. He was a great planter of trees. "It was," he said, "his favourite recreation. In his vacations he used to prune with his own hands the trees which he himself had planted. Beginning at five in the morning, he wrought with his knife every spare hour. Of Auchinleck he was passionately fond."[3] He was not the man to prefer Fleet Street to the beauties of Nature. "I perceive some dawnings of taste for the country," wrote his son on one of his visits to his old home. "I will force a taste for rural beauties."[4] He never succeeded in the attempt, and though he often boasted of "walking among the rocks and woods of his ancestors," it was from a distance that he most admired them.
Rarely were two men more unlike. The old man had in excess that foresight which in Boswell was so largely wanting. He had built himself a new house, which Johnson describes as "very magnificent and very convenient;" but he had proceeded "so slowly and prudently that he hardly felt the expense."[5] Across the front of it he put the inscription—
Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit æquus."[6]
"It is," writes Boswell, "characteristic of the founder; but the animus æquus is, alas! not inheritable, nor the subject of devise. He always talked to me as if it were in a man's own power to attain it; but Dr. Johnson told me that he owned to him, when they were alone, his persuasion that it was in a great measure constitutional, or the effect of causes which do not depend on ourselves, and that Horace boasts too much when he says, æquum mi animum ipse parabo."
