His stately person and agreeable countenance, with the most unaffected affability, gave me a high satisfaction. There is perhaps a weakness, that is to say, more fancy or warmth of feeling than is quite reasonable in me, but there is much pleasure arising from it. I could with the most perfect honesty expatiate on Lord Erroll’s good qualities as if I was bribed to do it. His agreeable look and softness of address relieved that awe which his majestic person and the idea of his being Lord High Constable of Scotland would have inspired.

2His lordship not only “said grace both before and after supper with much decency”, but also “told us a story of a man who was executed at Perth some years ago for murdering a woman, who was with child to him, and a former child he had by her”. The man’s hand was first cut off. “He was then pulled up. But the rope broke, and he was forced to lie an hour on the ground till another rope was brought from Perth, the execution being in a wood at some distance—the place where the murders were committed. ‘There’ said my lord”—apparently without humour—“I see the hand of Providence”. “I was”, adds Boswell, “really happy here”. He expands, displaying some of his favourite topics, and most characteristic touches: “I saw in my lord the best disposition and best principles; and I saw him in my mind’s eye to be the representative of the ancient Boyds of Kilmarnock”. They drink, are accompanied to their rooms, and Boswell is reminded by the Earl of his old acquaintance with Boswell’s father, and pressed to pay a return visit.

I had a most elegant room. But there was a fire in it which blazed, and the sea, to which my windows looked, roared, and the pillows were made of some sea-fowl’s feathers which had to me a disagreeable smell. So that by all these causes, I was kept awake a good time. I began to think that Lord Kilmarnock might appear to me, and I was somewhat dreary. But the thought did not last long, and I fell asleep.

• 7 James Boswell, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France 1765–1766, ed. Frank Brady and (...)

I set out at eleven. As I went out at one of the ports, I saw a crowd running to the execution of a thief. I jumped out of my chaise and went close to the gallows. The criminal stood on a ladder, and a priest held a crucifix before his face. He was tossed over, and hung with his face uncovered, which was hideous. I stood fixed in attention to this spectacle… The hangman put his feet on the criminal’s head and neck and had him strangled in a minute. I then went into a church and kneeled with great devotion before an altar splendidly lighted up. Here then I felt three successive scenes: raging love—gloomy horror—grand devotion. The horror indeed I only should have felt.7

6What at one time can produce gloom, dreariness, sleeplessness and dread is also capable of stimulating devotion, religious awe, and even love—though in Turin Boswell is thinking more of the Countess of Scarnafigi, with whom he has just failed to conduct a liaison, than about the Almighty. Equally, the terror of ghosts can arise simply from a turn in the conversation, as in London in March 1763 during an evening with the Kellies and the Erskines, an occasion when Boswell is already “most miserably melancholy”:

I stayed supper, after which we talked of death, of theft, robbery, murder, and ghosts. Lady Betty and Lady Anne declared seriously that at Allanbank they were disturbed two nights by something walking and groaning in the room, which they afterwards learnt was haunted. This was very strong. My mind was now filled with a real horror instead of an imaginary one. I shuddered with apprehension. I was frightened to go home. Honest Erskine made me go with him, and kindly gave me half of his bed, in which, though a very little one, we passed the silent watches in tranquillity. (pp. 237–8)

7While an execution is unambiguously real, which for Boswell is one of its attractions, an opportunity to watch a live individual passing out of the world, his imagination is also aroused by the “real horror” that is a convincingly “strong” ghost story, or by a credible setting—the fire, the smell, the sound of waters, memories of Jacobitism and execution—in which a ghost, with every reason to return, might plausibly appear.

8In the quiet of his study, in daylight, Boswell wrote a Hypochondriack essay on executions, published in May 1783, though most of it had appeared originally in the Publick Advertiser for 26 April 1768 as a letter from “Mortalis” describing the executions of Benjamin Payne, the highwayman, and the attorney-forger James Gibson, respectively referred to throughout by Boswell as “Payne” and “Mr Gibson”. Confessing (in 1768, then) his frequent attendances (“I myself am never absent from any of them”), he describes the progress in his reactions:

• 8 James Boswell, Boswell’s Column 1777–1783, ed. Margery Bailey, London: William Kimber, 1951, p. 345 (...)

When I first attended executions, I was shocked to the greatest degree. I was in a manner convulsed with pity and terror, and for several days, but especially nights after, I was in a very dismal situation. Still, however, I persisted in attending them, and by degrees my sensibility abated; so that I can now see one with great composure, and my mind is not afterwards haunted with frightful thoughts: though for a while a certain degree of gloom remains upon it.8

9Ideally, the execution will help to teach us how to die, to prepare us for our own end, “that alarming scene of quitting all that we have ever seen, heard, or known”. Therefore, observes “Mortalis”, “I feel an irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as I there behold the various effects of the near approach of death, according to the various tempers of the unhappy sufferers, and by studying them I learn to quiet and fortify my own mind”. In this enterprise, the end of “Mr Gibson” was model: “He took leave of his friends, stepped out of the coach, and walked firmly to the cart”; he “never once altered his countenance. He refreshed his mouth by sucking a sweet orange”; “He appeared to all the spectators a man of sense and reflexion, of a mind naturally sedate and placid. He submitted with a manly and decent resolution to what he knew to be the just punishment of the law”. In short, “from first to last, his behaviour was the most perfect that I ever saw, or indeed could conceive of one in his unhappy circumstances”. No fear of ghosts from being a spectator at such a death—quite the contrary: the danger of the kind of “dreary” emotions that Boswell was to experience at Slains is explicitly ruled out. As “Mortalis” signs off: “I wish, Sir, I may not have detained you too long with a letter on subjects of a serious but I will not say of a gloomy cast, because from my manner of viewing them I do say that they become matters of curious speculation, and are relieved of their dreary ideas.”

10In earlier essays of the series, however (but written, of course, later than the “Mortalis” letter), Boswell has other observations and reflections concerning death and dying that indicate the temporary nature of “Mr Gibson’s” example. In the fourteenth number, published in November 1778, and on the subject of death, he confesses:

• 9 James Boswell, Boswell’s Column 1777–1783, p. 87.

Neither in my apprehension can any man whose mind is not naturally dull, or grown callous by age, be without uneasiness when he looks forward to the act of dissolution itself. A Hypochondriack fancies himself at different times suffering death in all the various ways in which it has been observed; and thus he dies many times before his death. I myself have been frequently terrified, and dismally afflicted in this way; nor can I yet secure my mind against it at gloomy seasons of dejection.9

• 14 Ibid., p. 128. Subsequent quotation p. 128.

[…] as he brought into my mind some dreary Tolbooth Kirk ideas, than which nothing has given me more gloomy feelings. I shall never forget the dismal hours of apprehension that I have endured in my youth from narrow notions of religion while my tender mind was lacerated with infernal horror.14

13He is, he asserts, “surprised how I have got rid of these notions so entirely”, and declares: “Thank God, my mind is now clear and elevated. I am serene and happy. I can look up to my Creator with adoration and hope.” Yet the narrowness of his Presbyterian upbringing is something he returns to persistently in his journals, and which reappears to threaten his mental security throughout his life, so much so that he even feels it necessary, as a father of by then three young children, to ensure that “some fear” is mixed early in their minds, otherwise “I apprehend religion will not be lasting”:

• 15 James Boswell, Boswell Laird of Auchinleck 1778–1782, ed. J. W. Reed and F. A. Pottle, Edinburgh: E (...)

I told them in the evening so much about black angels or devils seizing bad people when they die and dragging them down to hell, a dark place (for I had not yet said anything of fire to them, and perhaps never will), that they were all three suddenly seized with such terror that they cried and roared out and ran to me for protection.15

15Ghosts, inevitably in this context, are ambiguous. At best, their existence is confirmation that “annihilation” need not be dreaded: there is, after all, a future state. But this is poor comfort when the nature of that state, or of the individual soul’s place in it, is rendered terrifying without being rendered certain. The possibility of a “horrible state of being”, even of being dragged to “a dark place”, is always there. Boswell sought confirmation of ghosts, and of the whole realm of the supernatural, therefore, as both a positive and a negative reassurance, not least through the views of Johnson. At one point in the Life, in fact, there is a footnote acknowledgement, made by Edmond Malone for the 1799 edition, as to why ghosts are so often a feature of Johnson’s conversation:

• 18 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. G.B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols, Oxford: (...)

As this subject frequently recurs in these volumes, the reader may be led erroneously to suppose that Dr Johnson was so fond of such discussions, as frequently to introduce them. But the truth is, that the author himself delighted in talking concerning ghosts, and what he has frequently denominated, the mysterious; and therefore took every opportunity of leading Johnson to converse on such subjects.18

16On this occasion, on 15 April 1781, Johnson is “led” into discussing “apparitions”, observing (in remarks confirmed by the journal for this day):

• 19 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, vol. IV, p. 94; also Boswell Laird of Auchinleck, p. 325.

A total disbelief of them is adverse to the opinion of the existence of the soul between death and the last day; the question simply is, whether departed spirits ever have the power of making themselves perceptible to us: a man who thinks he has seen an apparition, can only be convinced himself; his authority will not convince another.19

• 25 Ibid., p. 99.

Strong reasons for incredulity will readily occur. This faculty of seeing things out of sight is local, and commonly useless. It is a breach of the common order of things, without any visible reason or perceptible benefit. It is ascribed only to a people very little enlightened; and among them, for the most part, to the mean and the ignorant.25

19At the end of the published Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and writing therefore some time in 1785, Boswell makes a retraction from the degree of belief he afforded the second sight, back in the autumn of 1773, after the completion of the tour.

• 27 James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), p. 424.

I own, I returned from the Hebrides with a considerable degree of faith in the many stories of that kind which I heard with a too easy acquiescence, without any close examination of the evidence: but, since that time, my belief in those stories has been much weakened, by reflecting on the careless inaccuracy of narrative in common matters, from which we may certainly conclude that there may be the same in what is more extraordinary.27

20Nevertheless, the fact is that Boswell perambulated the Highlands and islands as predisposed to accept superstitions and the supernatural as he was to indulge in reveries of feudalism, clan loyalties and memories of 1745. Stories are collected in his journal and reproduced almost word for word in the published Tour:

• 28 James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1936), p. 123.

Mrs Mackinnon, who was a daughter of old Kingsburgh, told us that her father was one day riding in Skye, and some women who were at work in a field on the side of the road told him they heard two taisks, that is, two voices of persons about to die; “and what,” said they, “is extraordinary, one of them is an English taisk, which we never heard before”. When he returned, he at that very place met two funerals, and one of them was of a woman who had come from the mainland and could speak only English. This, she told us, made a great impression upon her father.28

• 30 Ibid., pp. 88–9.

I thought it best to mention it to several people, because it made a strong impression upon my mind, and in case it should unhappily prove true, I might have witnesses to attest what I said. Yet I can hardly have any pretence to the second sight, being no Highlander. However, as others have had strange supernatural communications, I knew not but it might be my case.30

23For Boswell, the Hebrides journey was the opportunity to encounter, in the company of the great rationalist, all that made for the irrational in his own temperament and to which his own response was in part unashamed pride, as with his feudal and family vanities, and in part, as with his credulities and his fears of spectres, a self-conscious mix of embarrassment and sheer terror. As the incident at Slains shows, these impulses were as inextricably linked in the mesh of Boswell’s emotional and spiritual resources as his “frankness and gaiety” was with his recurrent dreariness, his “gloomy seasons of dejection”. For Boswell, Johnson visiting Scotland was not simply the acquisition of a windfall of biographical materials: it represented the light of English, and London, culture shining into the dark places of kirk, of prejudice, of superstition and, in all its intricateness, of Scottishness.

24The one Scot whom Johnson did not meet while in Scotland, amongst the many major and minor luminaries Boswell had lined up, was of course David Hume, even though Hume stood for many things that Boswell would most wish to have Johnson dispel. The encounter, indeed, would have brought little pleasure to either man, and Boswell was far easier feeding, during his friendship with each of them, irritating titbits of what the other thought or had said. The Hume problem, for Boswell, was virtually the negative of the ghost problem: if Hume was to be accepted, then no ghosts, no supernatural, but equally no future state, dark, light or otherwise, only the dreary prospect of annihilation. Johnson’s views on Hume, as on “the mysterious”, are repeatedly sought conversationally, and in any company but Hume’s. Boswell was happy, in the spring of 1776, to contrive an encounter between Johnson and his political negative, John Wilkes, and to write it up lavishly for the Life. Something far closer to home, a meeting between two spiritual poles, could not be contemplated, was capable of destroying all that Boswell, complicatedly, held both dear and in fear.

In this style of good humour and levity did I conduct the conversation. Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated.

26“But”, adds Boswell, “I maintained my faith”. But, he might also have added with hindsight, at a cost. The interview concluded, in a way that the second sight debate was not, nor the ghost debate, he leaves “with impressions which disturbed me for some time”.

27Boswell’s “some time” was at least fourteen months. In September 1777 (and six months, therefore, after he had written an expanded version of his journal record of the interview) he raised the subject of Hume’s dying state of mind with Johnson, at Ashbourne, telling him that

• 34 James Boswell, Boswell in Extremes, pp. 154–5.

David Hume’s persisting in his infidelity when he was dying shocked me much… I said he told me he was quite easy at the thought of annihilation. “He lied,” said Dr Johnson. “He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he lied than that so very improbable a thing should be as a man not afraid of death; of going into an unknown state and not being uneasy at leaving all that he knew.”34

• 39 James Boswell, The Hypochondriack, p. 274.

I myself visited a celebrated infidel when he was dying, and when I tried to raise the pleasing hope of a future state, he said, “You never see it but through the medium of Tartarus, or Phlegethon, or Hell”. I concluded that he must in his early years have had the idea of Religion so associated with that of misery, that he was instigated to exert himself against it as an enemy, without ever having candidly examined if it might not be a friend. A friend he would have found it.39

29Boswell aspires to the role of comforter, secure in religious certainty, but can do so only by rewriting a past that persistently reasserted itself, troubling the surface of “The Hypochondrack’s” serenity.

30Such reassurance as Dun, and even Johnson, might offer could only ever be temporary. Boswell was haunted by Hume as vividly as he feared the appearance of Lord Kilmarnock. If Hume was correct, he would not reappear, no matter how much his dying aspect had startled Boswell; yet Boswell would desperately have wished for Hume’s reappearance, as providing a fearsome confirmation unavailable from the words of a minister, or a sage. In March 1778, in London with his fellow advocate Andrew Crosbie, with whom he had travelled from Edinburgh, Boswell raises once again the subject of ghosts.

• 40 James Boswell, Boswell in Extremes, p. 219.

Crosbie has a vigorous mind. He was when young afraid of ghosts. He forced himself first to be alone in dark rooms, and afterwards actually lay for some part of the night upon a tombstone in a churchyard, till he got quite the better of his timidity. He assured me he was not afraid of death. But I could not believe him, and told him he did not think of it.40

31Boswell, “who was very pious”, could never have so settled the matter. Everything in his hypochondriac being forbade it, his beliefs, his desperation for confirmation and his terror at finding it.

32The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was published on 1 October 1785. Boswell’s reaction to the appearance of The Picturesque Beauties of Boswell, by Thomas Rowlandson, in May 1786, was to welcome a renewal of interest in his book, which was then awaiting its third edition. Rowlandson’s elaboration of what was seen “in imagination” at Slains, however, is a shrewd encapsulation of the most deep-seated instincts of Boswell’s life. Lord Kilmarnock, in the complete garb of a Highlander, a radiant axe where his head should be, surmounted by a bonnet, pulls back the curtain of the bed. A terrified Boswell, his hair on end, his nightcap six inches above his head, clutches at the lower sheets, lifting them to reveal a chamberpot, next to which is an open diary. Heredity, executions, ghosts, death, and writing of it: Boswell’s supernatural encounters.