"want of tenderness which," said Johnson, "is want of parts." This part of his character is seen in the following anecdote recorded of him by his son:
"I mentioned to Johnson a respectable person of a very strong mind, who had little of that tenderness which is common to human nature; as an instance of which, when I suggested to him that he should invite his son, who had been settled ten years in foreign parts, to come home and pay him a visit, his answer was, 'No, no, let him mind his business.' Johnson. 'I do not agree with him, Sir, in this. Getting money is not all a man's business : to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.'"
He had what Boswell calls "the dignified courtesy of an old Baron," and when Johnson left "was very civil to him, and politely attended him to his post chaise." But he was not in the least soothed by the compliments which he paid him in his book. Boswell had hoped that he might be moved. Writing to Johnson just after it had been published, he said: "You have done Auchinleck much honour, and have, I hope, overcome my father, who has never forgiven your warmth for monarchy and episcopacy. I am anxious to see how your pages will operate upon him."[1] His anxious wish was grievously disappointed. A few months later he wrote to his friend Temple: "My father is most unhappily dissatisfied with me. … He harps on my going over Scotland with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous!) and wandering (or some such phrase) to London. How hard it is that I am totally excluded from parental comfort! I have a mind to go to Auchinleck next autumn, and try what living in a mixed stupidity of attention to common objects and restraint from expressing any of my own feelings can do with him."[2] When his father and Johnson were both dead he indulged in the pious hope that "as they were both worthy Christian men, they had met in happiness. But I must observe," he adds, "injustice to my friend's political principles and my own, that they have met in a place where there is no room for Whiggism." Johnson, it is true, "always said the first Whig was the Devil," but on the other hand, some Presbyterian who drew up an epitaph on Lochiel, declared in it that he "is now a Whig in heaven."[3]
That pride in his ancient blood, which Boswell boasted was his predominant passion, was very strong in the old lord. In the son, if it really existed in any strength, it was happily overpowered by
