I wish you would enable yourself to borrow more;' and i. 105, where he described 'a man of a great deal of knowledge of the world, fresh from life, not strained through books.'
[1027] 'Lord Auchinleck has built a house of hewn stone, very stately and durable, and has advanced the value of his lands with great tenderness to his tenants. I was, however, less delighted with the elegance of the modern mansion, than with the sullen dignity of the old castle.' Johnson's Works, ix. 159. 'The house is scarcely yet finished, but very magnificent and very convenient.' Piozzi Letters, i. 201. See ante, i. 462.
[1028] See ante, ii. 413, and v. 91.
[1029] The relation, it should seem, was remote even for Scotland. Their common ancestor was Robert Bruce, some sixteen generations back. Boswell's mother's grandmother was a Bruce of the Earl of Kincardine's family, and so also was his father's mother. Rogers's Boswelliana, pp. 4, 5.
[1030] He refers to Johnson's pension, which was given nearly two years after George Ill's accession. Ante, i. 372.
[1031] Ante, p. 51.
[1032] He repeated this advice in 1777. Ante, iii. 207.
[1033] 'Of their black cattle some are without horns, called by the Scots humble cows, as we call a bee, an humble bee, that wants a sting. Whether this difference be specifick, or accidental, though we inquired with great diligence, we could not be informed.' Johnson's Works, ix. 78.
Johnson, in his Dictionary, gives the right derivation of humble-bee, from hum and bee. The word Humble-cow is found in Guy Mannering, ed. 1860, iii. 91:--'"Of a surety," said Sampson, "I deemed I heard his horse's feet." "That," said John, with a broad grin, "was Grizzel chasing the humble-cow out of the close."'
[1034] 'Even the cattle have not their usual beauty or noble head.' Church and Brodribb's Tacitus.
[1035] 'The peace you seek is here--where is it not? If your own mind be equal to its lot.' CROKER. Horace, I Epistles, xi. 29.
[1036] Horace, I Epistles, xviii. 112.
[1037] This and the next paragraph are not in the first edition. The paragraph that follows has been altered so as to hide the fact that the minister spoken of was Mr. Dun. Originally it stood:--'Mr. Dun, though a man of sincere good principles as a presbyterian divine, discovered,' &c. First edition, p. 478.
[1038] See ante, p. 120.
[1039] Old Lord Auchinleck was an able lawyer, a good scholar, after the manner of Scotland, and highly valued his own advantages as a man of good estate and ancient family; and, moreover, he was a strict presbyterian and Whig of the old Scottish cast. This did not prevent his being a terribly proud aristocrat; and great was the contempt he entertained and expressed for his son James, for the nature of his friendships and the character of the personages of whom he was engoue one after another. 'There's nae hope for Jamie, mon,' he said to a friend. 'Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? He's done wi' Paoli--he's off wi' the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon?' Here the old judge summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. 'A dominie, mon--an auld dominie: he keeped a schule, and cau'd it an acaadamy.' Probably if this had been reported to Johnson, he would have felt it more galling, for he never much liked to think of that period of his life [ante, i.97, note 2]; it would have aggravated his dislike of Lord Auchinleck's Whiggery and presbyterianism. These the old lord carried 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. It may be surmised how far Lord Auchinleck, such as he is here described, was likely to suit a high Tory and episcopalian like Johnson. As they approached Auchinleck, Boswell conjured Johnson by all the ties of regard, and in requital of the services he had rendered him upon his tour, that he would spare two subjects in tenderness to his father's prejudices; the first related to Sir John Pringle, president of the Royal Society, about whom there was then some dispute current: the second concerned the general question of Whig and Tory. Sir John Pringle, as Boswell says, escaped, but the controversy between Tory and Covenanter raged with great fury, and ended in Johnson's pressing upon the old judge the question, what good Cromwell, of whom he had said something derogatory, had ever done to his country; when, after being much tortured, Lord Auchinleck at last spoke out, 'God, Doctor! he gart kings ken that they had a lith in their neck'--he taught kings they had a joint in their necks. Jamie then set to mediating between his fathe