glutton have been excited at the careless and even rude treatment which he received from our travellers, who had engaged to dine with him on the day they left Edinburgh! They were very late in starting, for Johnson in his good-nature had let himself be detained "by young Mr. Tytler who came to show some essays which he had written." They did not leave till one o'clock, and then Boswell insisted on their going to see Rosslyn Castle and the Chapel. They dined and drank tea at the inn. As if this were not enough, and as if no baronet were waiting dinner, they next went to Hawthornden, and "had Rare Ben in mind" who one hundred and forty-three years earlier had there visited the poet Drummond. "It was very late," writes Boswell, "before we reached the seat of Sir John Dalrymple, who, certainly with some reason, was not in very good humour. Our conversation was not brilliant. We supped, and went to bed in ancient rooms, which would have better suited the climate of Italy in summer, than that of Scotland in the month of November." Dalrymple was alive when this account was published. Not finding their quarters to their mind they went on next evening two miles further to the inn at Blackshields. Pennant, who had passed a night there in September of the previous year, describes "the country as good, full of corn, and decked with numbers of small woods. The inn is good."[1] Just one year and two days before our travellers arrived there, on November 19, 1772, one Mr. John Scott of Newcastle had married, in this same village and most probably in the inn, pretty Miss Elizabeth Surtees. She had escaped by a ladder from her father's house and had run with him across the Border. He was twenty-one and she eighteen. "Jack Scott," said a friend on hearing of it, "has run off with Bessy Surtees, and the poor lad is undone." In the end he became Lord Chancellor and Earl of Eldon.[2] The certificate of marriage shows that the ceremony was performed in the presence of James and Thomas Fairbairn. From a paper in the Gentleman's Magazine I know that Fairbairn was the innkeeper's name.
On the morning of Monday, November 22, the coach took up Johnson and off he drove homewards. On the following Saturday he wrote to Boswell from London:—"I came home last night, without any incommodity, danger, or weariness, and am ready to begin a new journey. I shall go to Oxford on Monday." There
- ↑ Tour in Scotland, ed. 1776, ii. 259, 260.
- ↑ Twiss's Life of Lord Eldon, ed. 1846, i. 57, and the Gentleman's Magazine, 1771, p. 543.
