John Johnston of Grange (c. 1729-1786) was a Dumfriesshire laird, Edinburgh legal writer, and the oldest intimate friend and correspondent of James Boswell. He was the younger son of John Johnston of Heithat (d. 1749 or 1759), a cadet of the Johnstons of Westerhall in Dumfriesshire, and succeeded his childless elder brother William around 1762 in the small ancestral border estate of Grange (together with Upperbanks) in the parish of Tundergarth, Annandale.
Trained in the law in Edinburgh, Johnston practised for many years as a writer (solicitor and legal agent) in Edinburgh during the terms of the Court of Session while spending the spring and autumn vacations at Grange. Quiet, modest, romantically nostalgic for the older traditions of Scottish Toryism and Episcopalian piety, and chronically afflicted with melancholy and ill health, Johnston never married. He died at Grange on July 12, 1786.
In early biographies of Boswell, including the 1952 Yale edition of Boswell in Holland, Johnston was thought to be of the same age as Boswell. However, an appendix to The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange (1966), edited by Ralph S. Walker, establishes that Johnston was probably born in 1729 and certainly no later than 1731, making him roughly ten years Boswell's senior.
Boswell probably first met John Johnston around 1755 at the University of Edinburgh (possibly through Robert Hunter's Greek class or through Boswell's former tutor Joseph Ferguson, a native of Tundergarth). Along with William Johnson Temple, Johnston became Boswell's closest youthful confidant, sharing his romantic enthusiasm for feudal antiquity, Tory and royalist sentiment, and religious devotion, as well as a mutual susceptibility to hypochondria. In the autumn of 1762 Boswell stayed with Johnston at Grange during his harvest jaunt through Dumfriesshire and Galloway.
When Boswell moved to London in November 1762, he chose Johnston as the sole recipient and reader of his London Journal, 1762-1763, dispatching the quarto pages to Edinburgh in weekly parcels franked by Members of Parliament so that Johnston might follow his daily adventures, conversations, and reflections. After Boswell's return from his Grand Tour and admission to the Faculty of Advocates in 1766, Johnston ("worthy Grange") frequently acted as agent in Boswell's legal cases, dined at his table in Edinburgh, and hosted him at Grange when Boswell travelled between Scotland and London.
Their surviving correspondence from September 1759 to Johnston's death in July 1786 - comprising 142 letters from Boswell to Johnston and 22 from Johnston to Boswell - was edited by Ralph S. Walker in 1966 as The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange, the inaugural volume of the Yale Research Edition.
The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange was published by Yale University Press in 1966 and is available via AbeBooks.