drinking, toasting, and quarrelling," drank the royal healths to a late hour of the night. "The wreck and the fumes of that hot and scandalous night" tainted the air of the Court for a whole week.[1] From the Hall our travellers passed into the Inner House, where the fifteen judges sat together as "a Court of Review." Like Carlyle, Johnson saw "great Law Lords this and that, great advocates, alors célèbres, as Thiers has it." There were Hailes, and Kames, and Monboddo, on the Bench, and Henry Dundas, Solicitor General. The judges wore long robes of scarlet faced with white, but though their dignity was great, their salaries were small when compared with those paid to their brethren in Westminster Hall. The President had but £1.300 a year, and each of the fourteen Lords of Session but £700. Six of them, among whom was Boswell's father, received each £300 more as a Commissioner of Justiciary.[2] The room, or rather "den," in which they sat, "was so cased in venerable dirt that it was impossible to say whether it had ever been painted. Dismal though the hole was, the old fellows who had been bred there never looked so well anywhere else."[3]
In the same great pile of buildings as the Law Courts is the Advocates' Library, "of which Dr. Johnson took a cursory view." He, no doubt, "respectfully remembered "there its former librarian, Thomas Ruddiman, "that excellent man and eminent scholar," just as he remembered him a few days later at Laurencekirk, the scene of his labours as a schoolmaster. Perhaps a second time he "regretted that his farewell letter to the Faculty of Advocates when he resigned the office of their Librarian, was not, as it should have been, in Latin." According to Ruddiman's successor, David Hume, it was but "a petty office of forty or fifty guineas a year," yet "a genteel one" too. When that great writer came to write his letter of resignation, he used the curtest of English, and took care to express his contempt for the Curators. Two or three years earlier they had censured him for buying some French books, which they accounted "indecent and unworthy of a place in a learned library" and he had not forgiven them.[4] It was in the Laigh (or Under) Parliament House beneath, in which at this time were deposited the records of Scotland, that Johnson, "rolling about in this old
