Blue Nile Discovered

"Custom!" retorted the stranger, "no such thing--damn'd bad custom, if

it is one--don't tell me of customs--'Sbodikins, man, I know the rate of

exchange all over the world, and have drawn bills from Timbuctoo--My

friends in the Strand filed it along with Bruce's from Gondar--talk to

me of premium on a Bank of England post-bill!--What d'ye look at the

bill for?--D'ye think it doubtful--I can change it."

As noted in the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's "Saint Ronan’s Well", Gondar is the capital of Abyssinia, where Scottish travel writer James Bruce journeyed.  Bruce’s discovery of the source of the Blue Nile was made on November 14^th, 1770.  For Bruce, the realization of his dearly held objective, brought not joy, but depression, as he relates in his “Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile”.  Perhaps Bruce didn't know what to do next.

‘I was, at that very moment, of what had, for many years, been the principal object of my ambition and wishes: indifference, which from the usual infirmity of human nature, follows, at least for a time, complete enjoyment, had taken place of it.   The marsh and the fountains, in comparison with the rise of many of our rivers, became now a trifling object in my sight.  I remembered that magnificent scene in my own native country, where the Tweed, Clyde, and Annan, rise in one hill; three rivers, as I now thought, not inferior to the Nile in beauty, preferable to it in the cultivation of those countries through which they flow; superior, vastly superior to it in the virtues and qualities of the inhabitants, and in the beauty of the flocks crowding its pastures in peace, without fear of violence from man or beast…Grief, or despondency, now rolling upon me like a torrent…

Lord Chesterfield

'On Sunday, June 27 [1784], I found him rather better...We this day dined at Sir Joshua Reynolds's, with General Paoli, Lord Eliot, (formerly Mr. Eliot, of Port Eliot,) Dr. Beattie, and some other company. Talking of Lord Chesterfield;--JOHNSON. 'His manner was exquisitely elegant, and he had more knowledge than I expected.' BOSWELL. 'Did you find, Sir, his conversation to be of a superiour style?' JOHNSON. 'Sir, in the conversation which I had with him I had the best right to superiority, for it was upon philology and strange that a man who shewed he had so much affection for his son as Lord Chesterfield did, by writing so many long and anxious letters to him, almost all of them when he was Secretary of State, which certainly was a proof of great goodness of disposition, should endeavour to make his son a rascal. His Lordship told us, that Foote had intended to bring on the stage a father who had thus tutored his son, and to shew the son an honest man to every one else, but practising his father's maxims upon him, and cheating him. JOHNSON. 'I am much pleased with this design; but I think there was no occasion to make the son honest at all. No; he should be a consummate rogue: the contrast between honesty and knavery would be the stronger. It should be contrived so that the father should be the only sufferer by the son's villainy, and thus there would be poetical justice.'...'

One gets a quick picture of Lord Chesterfield and his son from this snippet of conversation from Boswell's "Life of Johnson".  It is the son that is referred to in Sir Walter Scott's "St. Ronan's Well" (his own son being less than 10 at the time the novel is set - probably 1809-1812 according to E.U.'s Walter Scott archive).  St. Ronan's Well was Scott's unsuccessful foray into the realm of domestic manners:

'Shall I go with you, my dear?" said Lady Penelope.

"No—I have too great a soul for that—I think some of them are lions only as far as the hide is concerned."

"But why would you go so soon, Clara?"

"Because my errand is finished—have I not invited you and yours? and would not Lord Chesterfield himself allow I have done the polite thing?"