A Memory

— We drove along the Barony Road, as it is called, — a long, straight avenue between rows of trees, the Via Sacra of the old Laird of Anchinleck. The storms of the past week had broken great branches from the trees on either side, and when we entered the grounds we found still more damage had been done. But to-day there is no breath of wind. The autumn sunshine is everywhere, gilding the fading leaves, making beautiful lights on the harvested fields, laying soft shadows on the distant hills. “The day is made for you,” some one says. Through the open gates we notice here and there in the woods a tree blown down ; some of them are oaks that were growing when Johnson came. But the woods fall back, there is a wide sweep of lawn, and in another minute we are at the house.

Auchinleck Place, a large white house, plain in style, handsome in its proportions, dignified rather than grand, stands as it was built some hundred and twenty years ago. The most beautiful thing about it is the situation. From the broad steps we look across the graveled road to the greensward, glittering this October morning with the early frost ; and beyond, the eye passes over pasture lands and woods, till the view is closed in some twenty miles away by the New Cumnock hills.

In the hall, which we enter from the steps, are several pictures, and over the drawingroom mantelpiece one of Mary, Queen of Scots, signing her abdication in Lochleven Castle. It was painted, we learn from Boswell, by a Mr. Hamilton in Rome, and Johnson, at Boswell’s request, composed a Latin inscription for the engraving taken from it.

Crossing the hall, a doorway leads to the staircase, where, on the wall, hangs a full-length portrait of “ the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican,” General Paoli. He is represented as a portly looking gentleman in a green velvet suit and powdered wig.

Upstairs is the library, — a long room, with a fireplace at either end. It is lined with bookcases, except for three windows on the farther side, looking to the back of the house. The view in that direction is as beautiful and as extensive as we saw to the front. The trees in the park are finer ; this is, if we may so say, the older part of the demesne where the former mansion-house stood. The gardens are over there, and just beyond them, hidden in its deep, rocky channel, flows the Lugar. On the far horizon we can trace a mountain outline : it is Arran. Was it mere chance, or taste which was rare in those days, that led Lord Auchinleck to choose this site for the new house ? Was the view among the things “ quod petis ” he sought and found here, stout old Whig that he was, with his doctrine of contentment ?

The library is the most interesting apartment in the house, but it would take days to explore its treasures, and we have only half an hour. The sober bindings of the volumes in calf and vellum give a scholastic air to the room, strangely at variance with the large billiard-table which takes up so much of the space. It seems a queer setting for the billiard-table, does it not, and a queer companionship for the books, —~ Ladislaw and Casaubon domiciled together, to their mutual discomfort ? It has taken more than one generation to bring this about. The man who filled the bookshelves which still give the chamber its name was not the man who had the table built there. The glazed doors of the bookcases are standing open to-day, and we keep dipping in among the volumes. Those Greek and Roman classics may have been what Johnson handled that rainy morning, the first day of his visit, while he still remembered his biographer’s urgent request to avoid Whiggism, Presbyterianism, and — Sir John Pringle, in conversation with his host. Alas ! before the week was out the request was forgotten, the promise gone to the winds.

“Dr. Johnson and my father came into collision. In the course of their altercation, Whiggism and Presbyterianism, Toryism and Episcopacy, were terribly buffeted. My worthy hereditary friend, Sir John Pringle, never having been mentioned, happily escaped without a bruise.” (November 6, 1773.)

Queen Mary’s prayer-book is here, a little red-bound volume of Latin prayers written and illuminated on vellum. An inscription on the fly-leaf tells what is known of its history, and how it was given by Mary’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Stuart, to Lord Harrington, when he escorted her to her home in the Palatinate. There is a manuscript of The Gentle Shepherd, and surely some of the very smallest volumes ever bound in calf and gold. They have the tiniest frontispieces and title - pages, and are dated “ Amsterdam.” One is a Treatise on Short Writing. On another shelf, stowed away among all sorts of odds and ends, we found a little worn volume entitled The New Year’s Gift, and on the flyleaf was written “ This book belonged to Samuel Johnson.” Over the fireplaces there are family portraits : of the first Boswell of Auchinleck, to whom the property was given, and who fell at Flodden ; of his wife ; of the Dutch ancestor ; of Grizzel Cochrane. Lord Auchinleck’s portrait is hung in tlic dining-room, but the son he thought “ clean gyte” is here, painted by Reynolds. An engraving of this picture forms the frontispiece to the fifth volume of Dr. Birkbeek Hill’s edition of the great biography. It has suffered reverses, this portrait. Within living memory it was turned to the wall, and a fool’s cap was displayed on the back of it. Poor James Boswell ! his “ moments of self-complacency ” would have been fewer could he have looked forward a little way. But there he is, at once the most famous and the most jeered at of biographers, the author to whom we owe so much, and for whom we care so little.

“ Quod petis hic eat ” (to quote again the motto on the front of the mansion) in the library, but we must see the remains of the old house which are still standing. We pass down among the trees, and, entering by a wicket-gate, go along the smooth grassy walks. And in my lady’s garden, right in what must have been the banqueting-hall, the flowers are growing, mingling their fleeting delicate graces with the severe outlines of the ancient masonry. Beyond is the bowling-green, and across from it, on a lofty point of rock jutting out above the river, the ruin of the oldest Auchinleck of them all, the castle whose “sullen dignity ” so pleased the sage.

“ I cannot figure a more romantic scene ! ” exclaims Boswell, as he relates how he pointed out its beauties to Dr. Johnson, and “ expatiated on the antiquity of my family.” Indeed, it is a beautiful and romantic scene. The Lugar, which here is joined by a burn, flows far below, almost hidden by the trees and brushwood. The old keep still commands the situation, but the enemies it feared and the lives it guarded alike are gone. The old order has changed, and given place to new fulfillments of human life.