rong Whig and active
Presbyterian, he was much esteemed in public and in private life. The
son had on his northern tour the pleasure to note, both at Aberdeen and
at Inverness, the high regard in which the old judge was held, and to
find his name and connection a very serviceable means of introduction to
the travellers in their 'transit over the Caledonian hemisphere.' Like
the father of Scott, who kept the whole bead-roll of cousins and
relations and loved a funeral, Lord Auchinleck bequeathed to his eldest
son at least one characteristic, the attention to relatives in the
remotest degree of kin. On the bench, like the judges in _Redgauntlet_,
Hume, Kames, and others, he affected the racy Doric; and his 'Scots
strength of sarcasm, which is peculiar to a North Briton,' was on many
an occasion lamented by his son who felt it, and acknowledged by Johnson
on at least one famous occasion. In the _Boswelliana_ are preserved many
of old Auchinleck's stories which Lord Monboddo says he could tell well
with wit and gravity--stories of the circuit and bar type of Braxfield
and Eskgrove, such as Scott used to tell to the wits round the fire of
the Parliament House. In his younger days he had been a beau, and his
affectation of red heels to his shoes and of red stockings, when brought
under the notice of his son by a friend, so affected Bozzy that he could
hardly sit on his chair for laughing. A great gardener and planter like
others of the race of old Scottish judges he had extended, in the
classic style of architecture then in fashion, the family mansion, and
had, as Johnson found, 'advanced the value of his lands with great
tenderness to his tenants.' Past the older residence flowed the river
Lugar, here of considerable depth, and then bordered with rocks and
shaded with wood--the old castle whose 'sullen dignity' was the nurse of
Boswell's devotion to the feudal principles and 'the grand scheme of
subordination,' of which he lets us hear so much when he touches on 'the
romantick groves of my ancestors.'

James Boswell, the immortal biographer of Johnson, was born in Edinburgh
on October 29, 1740. The earliest fact which is known about him is one
which he himself would have described as 'a whimsical or
characteristical' anecdote, and which he had told to Johnson:--'Boswell
in the year 1745 was a fine boy, wore a white cockade, and prayed for
King James, till one of his uncles, General Cochrane, gave him a
shilling on condition