ABSTRACT
When he visited Marischal College in Aberdeen on 23 August 1773, Samuel Johnson was forcefully struck by one painting in particular that he was shown in the college hall. ‘Large and well lighted’, this impressive space was marked, as Johnson later recorded, by ‘the picture of Arthur Johnston, who was principal of the college, and who holds among the Latin poets of Scotland the next place to the elegant Buchanan’.1 Like so much else that fell from Johnson’s lips during that memorable journey, the remark was neither casual nor uninformed. For he was already an ardent admirer of Johnston’s verse, attempting unsuccessfully to buy his own copy of the latter’s works while he was in Aberdeen and still searching for one in London as late as February 1777.2 Moreover, when Johnson and Boswell finally reached Inverness, the long-dead Aberdonian poet was still on the traveller’s mind, only this time in his alternative guise as chief promoter and publicist of his countrymen’s Latin verse. Johnson, striving now to conjure up a striking contrast between Scotland’s longstanding success in the cultural sphere and what he considered its continuing lack of material progress, fell instinctively back upon a famous collection of poetry, edited by none other than Arthur Johnston, that had been published at Amsterdam in 1637: ‘from the middle of the sixteenth century’, the lexicographer pronounced with audible satisfaction, ‘almost to the middle of the seventeenth, the politer studies were very diligently pursued. The Latin poetry of Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum would have done honour to any nation…’.3
