In 1759 a Bill for establishing this force had been brought into Parliament, and though Pitt acquiesced in the measure, it was thrown out by “the young Whigs.” Most Englishmen probably felt with Horace Walpole, when he rejoiced that “the disaffected in Scotland could not obtain this mode of having their arms restored.”[364] Two or three years later the literary men in Edinburgh, affronted by this refusal, formed themselves into a league of patriots. The name of The Militia Club, which they had at first thought of adopting, was rejected as too directly offensive. With a happy allusion to the part which they were to play in stirring up the fire and spirit of the country, they decided on calling themselves “The Poker.” Andrew Crosbie, the original of Mr. Counsellor Pleydell, was humorously elected Assassin, and David Hume was added as his Assessor, “without whose assent nothing should be done.”[365] It was urged with great force that Scotland was as much exposed as England to plunder and invasion. Why, it was asked, was she refused a militia when one had been granted to Cumberland and Westmoreland, and Lancashire? Had not those countries contributed more adventurers to the forces of the Young Pretender than all the Lowlands? “Why put a sword in the hands of foreigners for wounding the Scottish nation and name? A name admired at home for fidelity, regaled [sic] in every clime for strictness of discipline, and dreaded for intrepidity.”[366] In 1776 the Bill was a second time brought in, but was a second time rejected. “I am glad,” said Johnson, “that the Parliament has had the spirit to throw it out.”[367] By this time it was not timidity only which caused the rejection. The English were touched in their pockets. It was maintained that as Scotland contributed so little to the land-tax, so if she needed a militia she ought to bear the whole expense herself. “What enemy,” asked Johnson scornfully, “would invade Scotland where there is nothing to be got?”[368] It was not till the year 1793, in the midst of the alarms of a war with France, that the force was at last established, and Scotland in one more respect placed on an equality with England.

In Edinburgh such a club as this, formed of all the eager active spirits in the place, could act with the greater vigour from the ease with which the members could meet. In whatever quarter of the town men lived, even if they had moved to the squares which had lately been built to the north and south, they were not much more widely separated than the residents in the Colleges of Oxford. The narrowness of the limits in which they were confined is shown by the small number of hackney-coaches which served their wants. In London, in 1761, there were eight hundred; by 1784 they had risen to a thousand.[369] In Edinburgh there were but nine; and even these, it was complained, were rarely to be seen on the stand after three o’clock in the afternoon. It was in sedan chairs that visits of ceremony were paid; the bearers were Highlanders, as in London they were generally Irishmen.[370] The dinner-hour was still so early that the meal of careless and cheerful hospitality was the supper. In 1763 fashionable people dined at two; twenty years later at four or even at five.[371] At the time of Johnson’s visit three was probably the common hour. Dr. Carlyle describes the ease with which in his younger days a pleasant supper party was gathered together. “We dined where we best could, and by cadies[372] we assembled our friends to meet us in a tavern by nine o’clock; and a fine time it was when we could collect David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Elibank, and Drs. Blair and Jardine on an hour’s warning.”[373] Though the Scotch were “religious observers of hospitality,”[374] yet a stranger did not readily get invited to their favourite meal. “To be admitted to their suppers is a mark of their friendship. At them the restraints of ceremony are banished, and you see people really as they are.” The Scotch ladies, it was noticed, at these cheerful but prolonged repasts drank more wine than an English woman could well bear, “but the climate required it.”[375] The “patriotic Knox” describes the inhabitants of Edinburgh as being “not only courteous, obliging, open, and hospitable, but well-inclined to the bottle.” It was not to the climate that he attributed this joyous devotion, but “to their social dispositions and the excellence of their wines.”[376] Boswell has left us a description of a supper which he enjoyed at Hume’s new house in St. Andrew’s Square. He had Dr. Robertson and Lord Kames for his fellow-guests, and three sorts of ice-creams among the dishes. “What think you of the northern Epicurus style?” he asked. He complained, however, that he could recollect no conversation. “Our writers here are really not prompt on all occasions as those of London.”[377] He had been spoilt by the talk in the taverns of Fleet Street and the Turk’s Head Club, and was discontented because he did not find in St. Andrew’s Square a Johnson, a Burke, a Wilkes, and a Beauclerk.

Into Hume’s pleasant house Johnson unhappily never entered.[378] He even thought that his friend Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke College, had done wrong when he had met by invitation “that infidel writer” at dinner, and “had treated him with smooth civility.”[379] Yet a man who could yield to the temptation of the talk of Jack Wilkes had no right to stand aloof from David Hume. We should like to know what he would have thought of that philosopher’s soupe à la reine made from a receipt which he had copied in his own neat hand, or of his “beef and cabbage (a charming dish) and old mutton and old claret, in which,” he boasted, “no man excelled him.” Perhaps, however, if Johnson could have been persuaded to taste the claret, old as it was, he would have shaken his head over it and called it “poor stuff.”[380] The sheep-head broth he would certainly have refused, though one Mr. Keith did speak of it for eight days after,[381] and the Duke de Nivernois would have bound himself apprentice to Hume’s lass to learn it.[382] “The stye of that fattest of Epicurus’s hogs” he failed to visit. “You tell me,” wrote the great Gibbon to a friend who was at Edinburgh just at the time of Johnson’s arrival, “you tell me of a long list of Dukes, Lords, and Chieftains of renown to whom you are introduced; were I with you I should prefer one David to them all.”[383] Boswell could easily have brought the two men together, intimate as he was with both. Early in his life he was able to boast that one of them had visited him in the forenoon and the other in the afternoon of the same day.[384] Hume’s conversation perhaps was not after the fashion which Johnson liked. It certainly would not have come recommended to him by his broad Scotch accent. Nevertheless there was that about it which endeared it to his friends. For innocent mirth and agreeable raillery he was thought to be unmatched.[385] Adam Smith has celebrated his constant pleasantry. In his wit there was not the slightest tincture of malignity.[386] But Johnson would have nothing to do with him.[387] In Boswell’s house in James’s Court, that Sunday he spent there in Dr. Robertson’s company, he said “something much too rough both as to Mr. Hume’s head and heart,” which Boswell thought well to suppress. In the quiet stillness of that summer sabbath day in Edinburgh, the strong loud voice might almost have been carried across the narrow valley to St. Andrew’s Square, and startled the philosopher in his retirement.

Neither did Johnson see Adam Smith, who in Hume’s house had his room whenever he chose to occupy it. To meet a famous stranger he would, we may well believe, have willingly crossed the Firth from his house in Kirkaldy. But the two men had once met in London, and “we did not take to each other,” said Johnson. Had he been more tolerant, and sought the society of these two great Scotchmen, he would have seen in Scotland the best which Scotland had to show. Even as it was, in his visit to the capital and the seats of the other universities, in his tour through Lowlands, Highlands and Isles, he saw perhaps as great a variety of men and manners as had been seen in that country by any Englishman up to his time.