tumblers. Everything about him-his coat, his
wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus?s
dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eyes, his insatiable
appetite for fish sauce and veal pie with
plums, his mysterious practice of treasuring up
scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his
saw a man led by a bear!? So romantic and
fervid was his admiration of Johnson, that he tells
us he added A500 to the fortune of one of his
daughters, Veronica, because when a baby she was
not frightened by the hideous visage of the lexicographer.
LORD SEMPLE?S HOUSE, CASTLE HILL.
midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings,
his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous,
acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic Wit, his
vehemence and his insolence, his fits of tempestuous
rage,? &e, all served to make it a source of
wonder to Mrs. Boswell that her husband could
abide, much less worship, such a man. Thus, she
once said to him, with extreme warmth, ?I have
seen many a bear led by a man, bur I never before
?
Among those invited to meet him at James?s
Court was Margaret Duchess of Douglas, a lady
noted among those of her own rank for her illiteracy,
and whom Johnson describes as ?talking
broad Scotch with a paralytic voice, as scarcely
understood by her own countrymen ; ? yet it was
remarked that in that which we would term now a
spirit of ?? snobbery,? Johnson reserved his attentions
during the whole evening exclusively for the
The Lawnmarket.] JAMES BOSWELL. I01
duchess. A daughter of Douglas of Mains, she was
the widow of Archibald Duke of Douglas, who died
in 1761.
While on this visit, Patrick Lord Elibank, a
learned and accomplished noble, addressed a letter
to him, and they afterwards had various conversatkns
on literary subjects, all of which are duly
On one occasion he was in a large party, of
which David Hume was one. A mutual friend
proposed to introduce him to the historian, ?? No,
sir ! ? bellowed the intolerant moralist, and turned
away. Among Boswell?s friends and visitors at
James?s Court were Lords Kames and Hailes, the
annalist of Scotland; Drs. Robertson, Slab, and
recorded in the pages of the sycophantic Boswell.
Johnson was well and hospitably received by all
classes in Edinburgh, where his roughness of
manner and bearing were long proverbiaL ?? From
all I can learn,? says Captain Topham, who visited
the city in the following year, ?he repaid all their
attention to him with ill-breeding; and when in
the company of the ablest men in this country
his whole design was to show them how little he
thought of them.?
Beattie, and others, the most eminent of his
countrymen; but his strong predilection for
London induced him to move there with his
family, and in the winter of 1786 he was called to
the English bar. His old house was not immediately
abandoned to the plebeian population, as
his successor in it was Lady Wallace, dowager of
Sir Thomas Wallace of Craigie, and mother of the
unfortunate Captain William Wallace of the 15th
Hussars, whose involvement in the affairs of the
