of several thousand pounds. That he: possessed napery to the value of five hundred pounds is stated by Chambers to be a well-authenticated fact. "A large room in the house was the frequent scene of the marriages of runaway English couples. On one of the windows were scratched the words:
'Jeremiah and Sarah Bentham, 1768.'"[1]
It was from this miserable inn that Johnson, on August 14th, sent the following note to Boswell's house:
"Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd's.
"Saturday night."
Boswell went to him directly, and learnt from Scott that "the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out of the window. Scott said he was afraid that he would have knocked the waiter down." Boswell at once carried off Johnson to his own house. Scott he left behind with the sincere regret that he had not also a room for him. Could the future eminence of the great judge have been foreseen, or had his "amiable manners" been generally known, surely some one would have been found eager to welcome him as a guest and rescue him from the Canongate Stabler. "He was one of the pleasantest men I ever knew," wrote Sir Walter Scott, fifty-five years later, when he met him at a dinner at Richmond Park, "looking very frail and even comatose."[2] He lived some while longer, and did not die till the memory of this jaunt, and of everything else had been lost in the forgetfulness in which his mind sank beneath the burthen of fourscore years and ten.[3] Let us hope that on his first visit to Edinburgh, like Matthew Bramble, "he got decent lodgings in the house of a widow gentlewoman."[4]
- ↑ Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, p. 191. Perhaps this was Jeremy Bentham's father, who two years earlier had married for the second time: what was his wife's Christian name I have not been able to ascertain. The son did not visit Edinburgh in 1768. Dr. Chambers gives on p. 318 a list of the great people living in the Canongate about the year 1769. According to it there were two dukes, sixteen earls, two countesses, seven barons, seven lords of session, thirteen baronets, and four commanders-in-chief. The Edinburgh Directory for 1773–4 contains, however, the names of only about a dozen peers and peeresses.
- ↑ Lockhart's Life of Scott, ix. 244.
- ↑ He died on January 28, 1836.
- ↑ Humphry Clinker, ii. 224. Lodging-house keepers are entered in the Edinburgh Directory as Room-Setters and Boarders. Some were both, others only Room-Setters.
