the contempt he
entertained and expressed for his son James, for the nature of his
friendships and the character of the personages of whom he was _engoue_
one after another. 'There's nae hope for Jamie, mon,' he said to a
friend. 'Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? He's done wi'
Paoli--he's off wi' the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican; and whose
tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon?' Here the old judge
summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. 'A _dominie_, mon--an
auld dominie: he keeped a schule, and cau'd it an acaadamy.' Probably if
this had been reported to Johnson, he would have felt it more galling,
for he never much liked to think of that period of his life [_ante_,
i.97, note 2]; it would have aggravated his dislike of Lord Auchinleck's
Whiggery and presbyterianism. These the old lord carried to such a
height, that once, when a countryman came in to state some justice
business, and being required to make his oath, declined to do so before
his lordship, because he was not a _covenanted_ magistrate. 'Is that
a'your objection, mon?' said the judge; 'come your ways in here, and
we'll baith of us tak the solemn league and covenant together.' The oath
was accordingly agreed and sworn to by both, and I dare say it was the
last time it ever received such homage. It may be surmised how far Lord
Auchinleck, such as he is here described, was likely to suit a high Tory
and episcopalian like Johnson. As they approached Auchinleck, Boswell
conjured Johnson by all the ties of regard, and in requital of the
services he had rendered him upon his tour, that he would spare two
subjects in tenderness to his father's prejudices; the first related to
Sir John Pringle, president of the Royal Society, about whom there was
then some dispute current: the second concerned the general question of
Whig and Tory. Sir John Pringle, as Boswell says, escaped, but the
controversy between Tory and Covenanter raged with great fury, and ended
in Johnson's pressing upon the old judge the question, what good
Cromwell, of whom he had said something derogatory, had ever done to his
country; when, after being much tortured, Lord Auchinleck at last spoke
out, 'God, Doctor! he gart kings ken that they had a _lith_ in their
neck'--he taught kings they had a _joint_ in their necks. Jamie then
set to mediating between his father and the philosopher, and availing
himself of the judge's sense of hospitality, which was pu