This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SCOTCH DOMINIES.
279

able in Scotland than in England.[1] But the dominie, or tutor in a family, was still less esteemed. "He was raised," writes Sir Walter Scott, "from a humble class to a society where, whatever his personal attainments might be, he found himself placed at a humiliating distance from anything like a footing of equality. His remuneration was scanty in the extreme, and consisting (as if to fill up the measure of his dependence) not entirely of a fixed salary, but partly of the precarious prospect of future preferment in the Church. The Scotch dominie was assuredly one of the most pitiable of human beings."[2] It is a curious and perhaps a somewhat suspicious fact, that a very few years before Sir Walter supplied Mr. Croker with this amusing story about the old judge, he had put on record in the pages of the Quarterly Review the following anecdote: "When the old Scots judge Lord Auchinleck first heard of Johnson's coming to visit him at his rural castellum, he held up his hands in astonishment, and cried out, 'Our Jeemy's clean aff the hooks now! would ony body believe it? he's bringing down a dominie wi' him—an auld dominie.'"[3] This looks like a different version of the same story. Moreover, Boswell tells us that his father had desired him to invite him to his house. When Johnson called his school at Lichfield an academy, he does not seem to have used the term pretentiously, for in his Dictionary he defines the word under one of its meanings as "a place of education in contradistinction to the universities or public schools." It does not seem likely, moreover, that Lord Auchinleck had any feeling of contempt for Pascal Paoli, a man of good family, who for years had headed a rebellion against the tyranny first of Genoa and afterwards of France. He had visited Auchinleck two years before Johnson, and had been well received. Boswell, writing to Garrick on September 18, 1771, said: "I have just been enjoying the very great happiness of a visit from my illustrious friend, Pascal Paoli. He was two nights at Auchinleck, and you may figure the joy of my worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican hero in our romantic groves. Count Burgynski, the Polish ambassador, accompanied him."[4] Poland's days of sending ambassadors had nearly drawn to an end, for the first partition of the country was made in the following year. It was a strange chance which brought the last Corsican patriot and the last Polish ambas-

  1. Johnson's Works, ix. 158.
  2. Quarterly Review, No. 71, p. 225.
  3. Ib.
  4. Carrick Correspondence, i. 436.