Note 373:2 — Chapter IX

The assistant, whose remuneration was to be at the pleasure of the Faculty, according to the above minute, was Walter Goodall, an unfortunate scholar, whom Hume's predecessor in office, the celebrated Thomas Ruddiman, had attached to the library as a hanger-on and miscellaneous drudge. The extent of his emoluments may be appreciated from a minute of Faculty, (7th Jan. 1758,) which, in consideration of his long services, awards him a salary of "£5 a-year, over and above what he may receive from the keeper of the library." Goodall's character and fate are summed up in the sententious remark of Lord Hailes, that "Walter was seldom sober." Yet he did not a little for historical literature. He was a violent Jacobite and champion of the innocence of Queen Mary; and in 1754 he published, in two volumes 8vo, his "Examination of the Letters said to be written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to James, Earl of Bothwell, showing by intrinsick and extrinsick evidence that they are forgeries." In 1759 he edited the best edition of Fordun's Scotichronicon, in two volumes folio.

The following traditional anecdote has been preserved, of the keeper and his assistant. "One day, while Goodall was composing his treatise concerning Queen Mary, he became drowsy, and laying down his head upon his MSS. in that posture fell asleep. Hume entering the library, and finding the controversialist in that position, stepped softly up to him, and laying his mouth to Watty's ear, roared out with the voice of a stentor, that Queen Mary was a whore and had murdered her husband. Watty, not knowing whether it was a dream or a real adventure, or whether the voice proceeded from a ghost or a living creature, started up, and before he was awake or his eyes well opened, he sprang upon Hume, and seizing him by the throat, pushed him to the farther end of the library, exclaiming all the while that he was some base Presbyterian parson, who was come to murder the character of Queen Mary, as his predecessors had contributed to murder her person. Hume used to tell this story with much glee, and Watty acknowledged the truth of it with much frankness." Chambers's Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, voce Goodall.