Volume 2 / Act 2 — Act ii. sc. 1.

[258]

'Swear by thy gracious self, Which is the god of my idolatry.'

Romeo and Juliet, act ii. sc. 2. He was a God with whom he ventured to take great liberties. Thus on Jan. 10, 1776, he wrote:—'I have ventured to produce Hamlet with alterations. It was the most imprudent thing I ever did in all my life; but I had sworn I would not leave the stage till I had rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act. I have brought it forth without the grave-digger's trick and the fencing match. The alterations were received with general approbation beyond my most warm expectations.' Garrick Corres., ii. 126. See ante, ii. 78, note 4.

[259] This comparison between Shakespeare and Congreve is mentioned perhaps oftener than any passage in Boswell. Almost as often as it is mentioned, it may be seen that Johnson's real opinion is misrepresented or misunderstood. A few passages from his writings will shew how he regarded the two men. In the Life of Congreve (Works, viii. 31) he repeats what he says here:—'If I were required to select from the whole mass of English poetry the most poetical paragraph, I know not what I could prefer to an exclamation in The Mourning Bride.' Yet in writing of the same play, he says:—'In this play there is more bustle than sentiment; the plot is busy and intricate, and the events take hold on the attention; but, except a very few passages, we are rather amused with noise and perplexed with stratagem, than entertained with any true delineation of natural characters.' Ib, p. 26. In the preface to his Shakespeare, published four years before this conversation, he almost answered Garrick by anticipation. 'It was said of Euripides that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue, and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.' Ib, v. 106. Ignorant, indeed, is he who thinks that Johnson was insensible to Shakespeare's 'transcendent and unbounded genius,' to use the words that he himself applied to him. The Rambler, No. 156. 'It may be doubtful,' he writes, 'whether from all his successors more maxims of theoretical knowledge, or more rules of practical prudence, can be collected than he alone has given to his country.' Works, v. 131. 'He that has read Shakespeare with attention will, perhaps, find little new in the crowded world.' Ib, p. 434. 'Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation.' Ib, p. 152. And lastly he quotes Dryden's words [from Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie, edit. of 1701, i. 19] 'that Shakespeare was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.' Ib, p. 153. Mrs. Piozzi records (Anec., p. 58), that she 'forced Johnson one day in a similar humour [to that in which he had praised Congreve] to prefer Young's description of night to those of Shakespeare and Dryden.' He ended however by saying:—'Young froths and foams and bubbles sometimes very vigorously; but we must not compare the noise made by your tea-kettle here with the roaring of the ocean.' See also post, p. 96.

[260] Henry V, act iv., Prologue.

[261] Romeo and Juliet, act iv., sc. 3.

[262] King Lear, act iv., sc. 6.

[263] See ante, July 26, 1763.

[264] See ante, i. 388.

[265] In spite of the gross nonsense that Voltaire has written about Shakespeare, yet it was with justice that in a letter to Horace Walpole (dated July 15, 1768,) he said:—'Je suis le premier qui ait fait connaA(R)tre Shakespeare aux FranASec.ais…. Je peux vous assurer qu'avant moi personne en France ne connaissait la poA(C)sie anglaise.' Voltaire's Works, liv. 513.

[266] 'Of whom I acknowledge myself to be one, considering it as a piece of the secondary or comparative species of criticism; and not of that profound species which alone Dr. Johnson would allow to be "real criticism." It is, besides, clearly and elegantly expressed, and has done effectually what it professed to do, namely, vindicated Shakespeare from the misrepresentations of Voltaire; and considering how many young people were misled by his witty, though false observations, Mrs. Montagu's Essay was of service to Shakspeare with a certain class of readers, and is, therefore, entitled to praise. Johnson, I am assured, allowed the merit which I have stated, saying, (with reference to Voltaire,) "it is conclusive ad hominem."' BOSWELL. That this dull essay, which would not do credit to a clever school-girl of seventeen, should have had a fame, of which the echoes have not yet quite died out, can only be fully explained by Mrs. Montagu's great wealth and position in society. Contemptible as was her essay, yet a saying of hers about Voltaire was clever. 'He sent to the Academy an invective [against Shakespeare] that bears all the marks of passionate dotage. Mrs. Montagu happened to be present when it was read. Suard, one of their writers, said to her, "Je crois, Madame, que vous A¬tes un peu fAcchA(C) (sic) de ce que vous venez d'entendre." She replied, "Moi, Monsieur! point du tout! Je ne suis pas amie de M. Voltaire."' Walpole's Letters, vi. 394. Her own Letters are very pompous and very poor, and her wit would not seem to have flashed often; for Miss Burney wrote of her:—'She reasons well, and harangues well, but wit she has none.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 335. Yet in this same Diary (i. 112) we find evidence of the absurdly high estimate that was commonly formed of her. 'Mrs. Thrale asked me if I did not want to see Mrs. Montagu. I truly said, I should be the most insensible of all animals not to like to see our sex's glory.' That she was a very extraordinary woman we have Johnson's word for it. (See post, May 15, 1784.) It is impossible, however, to discover anything that rises above commonplace in anything that she wrote, and, so far as I know, that she said, with the exception of her one saying about Voltaire. Johnson himself, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, has a laugh at her. He had mentioned Shakespeare, nature and friendship, and continues:—'Now, of whom shall I proceed to speak? Of whom but Mrs. Montagu? Having mentioned Shakespeare and Nature, does not the name of Montagu force itself upon me? Such were the transitions of the ancients, which now seem abrupt, because the intermediate idea is lost to modern understandings. I wish her name had connected itself with friendship; but, ah Colin, thy hopes are in vain.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 101. See post, April 7, 1778.

[267] 'Reynolds is fond of her book, and I wonder at it; for neither I, nor Beauclerk, nor Mrs. Thrale, could get through it.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 23, 1773.

[268] Lord Kames is 'the Scotchman.' See ante, i. 393.

[269] 'When Charles Townshend read some of Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism, he said:—"This is the work of a dull man grown whimsical"—a most characteristical account of Lord Kames as a writer.' Boswelliana, p. 278. Hume wrote of it:—'Some parts of the work are ingenious and curious; but it is too abstruse and crabbed ever to take with the public.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 131. 'Kames,' he says, 'had much provoked Voltaire, who never forgives, and never thinks any enemy below his notice.' Ib, p. 195. Voltaire (Works, xliii. 302) thus ridicules his book:—'Il nous prouve d'abord que nous avons cinq sens, et que nous sentons moins l'impression douce faite sur nos yeux et sur nos oreilles par les couleurs et par les sons que nous ne sentons un grand coup sur la jambe ou sur la tA¬te.'

[270] L'AbbA(C) Dubos, 1670-1742. 'Tous les artistes lisent avec fruit ses RA(C)flexions sur la poA(C)sie, la peinture, et la musique. C'est le livre le plus utile qu'on ait jamais A(C)crit sur ces matiA"res chez aucune des nations de l'Europe.' Voltaire's SiA"cle de Louis XIV, i. 81.

[271] Bouhours, 1628-1702. Voltaire, writing of Bouhours' ManiA"re de bien penser sur les ouvrages d'esprit, says that he teaches young people 'A A(C)viter l'enflure, l'obscuritA(C), le recherchA(C), et le faux.' Ib, p. 54. Johnson, perhaps, knew him, through The Spectator, No. 62, where it is said that he has shown 'that it is impossible for any thought to be beautiful which is not just, … that the basis of all wit is truth.'

[272] Macbeth, act iii. sc. 2.

[273] In The False Alarm, that was published less than three months after this conversation, Johnson describes how petitions were got. 'The progress of a petition is well known. An ejected placeman goes down to his county or his borough, tells his friends of his inability to serve them, and his constituents of the corruption of the Government. His friends readily understand that he who can get nothing will have nothing to give. They agree to proclaim a meeting; meat and drink are plentifully provided, a crowd is easily brought together, and those who think that they know the reason of their meeting, undertake to tell those who know it not; ale and clamour unite their powers…. The petition is read, and universally approved. Those who are sober enough to write, add their names, and the rest would sign it if they could.' Works, vi. 172. Yet, when the petitions for Dr. Dodd's life were rejected, Johnson said:—'Surely the voice of the public when it calls so loudly, and calls only for mercy, ought to be heard.' Post, June 28, 1777. Horace Walpole, writing of the numerous petitions presented to the King this year (1769), blames 'an example so inconsistent with the principles of liberty, as appealing to the Crown against the House of Commons.' Some of them prayed for a dissolution of Parliament. Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iii. 382, 390. Two years earlier Lord Shelburne, when Secretary of State, had found among the subscribers to a petition for his impeachment, a friend of his, a London alderman. 'Oh! aye,' said the alderman when asked for an explanation, 'I did sign a petition at the Royal Exchange, which they told me was for the impeachment of a Minister; I always sign a petition to impeach a Minister, and I recollect that as soon as I had subscribed it, twenty more put their names to it.' Parl. Hist., xxxv. 167.

[274] See post, under March 24, 1776.

[275] Mr. Robert Chambers says that the author of the ballad was Elizabeth Halket, wife of Sir Henry Wardlaw. She died about 1727. 'The ballad of Hardyknute was the first poem I ever read, and it will be the last I shall forget.' SIR WALTER SCOTT. Croker's Boswell, p. 205.

[276] John Ray published, in 1674, A Collection of English Words, &c., and A Collection of English Proverbs. In 1768 the two were published in one volume.

[277] See Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 23, 1773.

[278]

'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.'

Macbeth, Act v. se. 5.

[279] In the Garrick Corres., i. 385, there is a letter from Mrs. Montagu to Garrick, which shows the ridiculous way in which Shakespeare was often patronised last century, and 'brought into notice.' She says:—'Mrs. Montagu is a little jealous for poor Shakespeare, for if Mr. Garrick often acts Kitely, Ben Jonson will eclipse his fame.'

[280] 'Familiar comedy is often more powerful on the theatre than in the page; imperial tragedy is always less.' Johnson's Works, v. 122. See also Boswell's Hebrides, August 15 and 16, 1773, where Johnson 'displayed another of his heterodox opinions—a contempt of tragick acting.' Murphy (Life, p. 145) thus writes of Johnson's slighting Garrick and the stage:—'The fact was, Johnson could not see the passions as they rose and chased one another in the varied features of that expressive face; and by his own manner of reciting verses, which was wonderfully impressive, he plainly showed that he thought there was too much of artificial tone and measured cadence in the declamation of the theatre.' Reynolds said of Johnson's recitation, that 'it had no more tone than it should the have.' Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 26, 1773. See post, April 3, 1773.

[281] See post, April 6, 1775, where Johnson, speaking of Cibber's 'talents of conversation,' said:—'He had but half to furnish; for one half of what he said was oaths.'

[282] See ante, June 13, 1763.

[283] See post, Sept. 21, 1777.

[284] On Oct. 18, one day, not two days before, four men were hanged at Tyburn for robbery on the highway, one for stealing money and linen, and one for forgery. Gent. Mag., xxxix. 508. Boswell, in The Hypochondriack, No. 68 (London Mag. for 1783, p. 203), republishes a letter which he had written on April 25, 1768, to the Public Advertiser, after he had witnessed the execution of an attorney named Gibbon, and a youthful highwayman. He says:—'I must confess that I myself am never absent from a public execution…. When I first attended them, I was shocked to the greatest degree. I was in a manner convulsed with pity and terror, and for several days, but especially nights after, I was in a very dismal situation. Still, however, I persisted in attending them, and by degrees my sensibility abated, so that I can now see one with great composure. I can account for this curiosity in a philosophical manner, when I consider that death is the most awful object before every man, whoever directs his thoughts seriously towards futurity. Therefore it is that I feel an irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as I there behold the various effects of the near approach of death.' He maintains 'that the curiosity which impels people to be present at such affecting scenes, is certainly a proof of sensibility, not of callousness. For, it is observed, that the greatest proportion of the spectators is composed of women.' See post, June 23, 1784.

[285] Of Johnson, perhaps, might almost be said what he said of Swift (Works, viii. 207):—'The thoughts of death rushed upon him at this time with such incessant importunity that they took possession of his mind, when he first waked, for many hours together.' Writing to Mrs. Thrale from Lichfield on Oct. 27, 1781, he says:—'All here is gloomy; a faint struggle with the tediousness of time, a doleful confession of present misery, and the approach seen and felt of what is most dreaded and most shunned. But such is the lot of man.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 209.

[286] Johnson, during a serious illness, thus wrote to Mrs. Thrale:—'When any man finds himself disposed to complain with how little care he is regarded, let him reflect how little he contributed to the happiness of others, and how little, for the most part, he suffers from their pain. It is perhaps not to be lamented that those solicitudes are not long nor frequent which must commonly be vain; nor can we wonder that, in a state in which all have so much to feel of their own evils, very few have leisure for those of another.' Piozzi Letters, i. 14. See post, Sept. 14, 1777.

[287] 'I was shocked to find a letter from Dr. Holland, to the effect that poor Harry Hallam is dying at Sienna [Vienna]. What a trial for my dear old friend! I feel for the lad himself, too. Much distressed. I dined, however. We dine, unless the blow comes very, very near the heart indeed.' Macaulay's Life, ii. 287. See also ante, i. 355.

[288] See post, Feb. 24, 1773, for 'a furious quarrel' between Davies and Baretti.

[289] Foote, two or three years before this, had lost one leg through an accident in hunting. Forster's Essays, ii. 398. See post, under Feb. 7, 1775.

[290] When Mr. Foote was at Edinburgh, he thought fit to entertain a numerous Scotch company, with a great deal of coarse jocularity, at the expense of Dr. Johnson, imagining it would be acceptable. I felt this as not civil to me; but sat very patiently till he had exhausted his merriment on that subject; and then observed, that surely Johnson must be allowed to have some sterling wit, and that I had heard him say a very good thing of Mr. Foote himself. 'Ah, my old friend Sam (cried Foote), no man says better things; do let us have it.' Upon which I told the above story, which produced a very loud laugh from the company. But I never saw Foote so disconcerted. He looked grave and angry, and entered into a serious refutation of the justice of the remark. 'What, Sir, (said he), talk thus of a man of liberal education;—a man who for years was at the University of Oxford;—a man who has added sixteen new characters to the English drama of his country!' BOSWELL.

Foote was at Worcester College, but he left without taking his degree. He was constantly in scrapes. When the Provost, Dr. Gower, who was a pedant, sent for him to reprimand him, 'Foote would present himself with great apparent gravity and submission, but with a large dictionary under his arm; when, on the doctor beginning in his usual pompous manner with a surprisingly long word, he would immediately interrupt him, and, after begging pardon with great formality, would produce his dictionary, and pretending to find the meaning of the word, would say, "Very well, Sir; now please to go on."' Forster's Essays, ii. 307. Dr. Gower is mentioned by Dr. King (Anec., p. 174) as one of the three persons he had known 'who spoke English with that elegance and propriety, that if all they said had been immediately committed to writing, any judge of the language would have pronounced it an excellent and very beautiful style.' The other two were Bishop Atterbury and Dr. Johnson.

[291] Cento. A composition formed by joining scrapes from other authours.' Johnson's Dictionary.

[292] See Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 30, 1773.

[293] For the position of these chaplains see The Tatler, No. 255, and The Guardian, No. 163.

[294] 'He had been assailed in the grossest manner possible by a woman of the town, and, driving her off with a blow, was set upon by three bullies. He thereupon ran away in great fear, for he was a timid man, and being pursued, had stabbed two of the men with a small knife he carried in his pocket.' Garrick and Beauclerk testified that every one abroad carried such a knife, for in foreign inns only forks were provided. 'When you travel abroad do you carry such knives as this?' Garrick was asked. 'Yes,' he answered, 'or we should have no victuals.' Dr. Johnson: His Friends and His Critics, p. 288. I have extracted from the Sessional Reports for 1769, p. 431, the following evidence as to Baretti's character:—'SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. I have known Mr. Baretti fifteen or sixteen years. He is a man of great humanity, and very active in endeavouring to help his friends. He is a gentleman of a good temper; I never knew him quarrelsome in my life; he is of a sober disposition…. This affair was on a club night of the Royal Academicians. We expected him there, and were inquiring about him before we heard of this accident. He is secretary for foreign correspondence.' 'DR. JOHNSON. I believe I began to be acquainted with Mr. Baretti about the year '53 or '54. I have been intimate with him. He is a man of literature, a very studious man, a man of great diligence. He gets his living by study. I have no reason to think he was ever disordered with liquor in his life. A man that I never knew to be otherwise than peaceable, and a man that I take to be rather timorous.' Qu. 'Was he addicted to pick up women in the street?' 'Dr. J. I never knew that he was.' Qu. 'How is he as to his eye-sight?' 'Dr. J. He does not see me now, nor I do not [sic] see him. I do not believe he could be capable of assaulting anybody in the street without great provocation.' 'EDMUND BURKE, ESQ. I have known him between three and four years; he is an ingenious man, a man of remarkable humanity—a thorough good-natured man.' 'DAVID GARRICK, ESQ. I never knew a man of a more active benevolence…. He is a man of great probity and morals.' 'DR. GOLDSMITH. I have had the honour of Mr. Baretti's company at my chambers in the Temple. He is a most humane, benevolent, peaceable man…. He is a man of as great humanity as any in the world.' Mr. Fitzherbert and Dr. Hallifax also gave evidence. 'There were divers other gentlemen in court to speak for his character, but the Court thought it needless to call them.' It is curious that Boswell passes over Reynolds and Goldsmith among the witnesses. Baretti's bail before Lord Mansfield were Burke, Garrick, Reynolds, and Fitzherbert. Mrs. Piozzi tells the following anecdotes of Baretti:—'When Johnson and Burke went to see him in Newgate, they had small comfort to give him, and bid him not hope too strongly. "Why, what can he fear," says Baretti, placing himself between them, "that holds two such hands as I do?" An Italian came one day to Baretti, when he was in Newgate, to desire a letter of recommendation for the teaching his scholars, when he (Baretti) should be hanged. "You rascal," replies Baretti in a rage, "if I were not in my own apartment, I would kick you down stairs directly."' Hayward's Piazzi, ii. 348. Dr. T. Campbell, in his Diary (p. 52), wrote on April 1, 1775:—'Boswell and Baretti, as I learned, are mortal foes; so much so that Murphy and Mrs. Thrale agreed that Boswell expressed a desire that Baretti should be hanged upon that unfortunate affair of his killing, &c.'

[295] Lord Auchinleck, we may assume. Johnson said of Pope, that 'he was one of those few whose labor is their pleasure.' Works, viii. 321.

[296] I have since had reason to think that I was mistaken; for I have been informed by a lady, who was long intimate with her, and likely to be a more accurate observer of such matters, that she had acquired such a niceness of touch, as to know, by the feeling on the outside of the cup, how near it was to being full. BOSWELL. Baretti, in a MS. note on Piozzi Letters, ii. 84, says:—'I dined with Dr. Johnson as seldom as I could, though often scolded for it; but I hated to see the victuals pawed by poor Mrs. Williams, that would often carve, though stone blind.'

[297] See ante, July 1 and Aug. 2, 1763.

[298] See ante, i. 232.

[299] An Italian quack who in 1765 established medicated baths in Cheney Walk, Chelsea. CROKER.

[300] The same saying is recorded post, May 15, 1784, and in Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 5, 1773. 'Cooke reports another saying of Goldsmith's to the same effect:—"There's no chance for you in arguing with Johnson. Like the Tartar horse, if he does not conquer you in front, his kick from behind is sure to be fatal."' Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 167. 'In arguing,' wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'Johnson did not trouble himself with much circumlocution, but opposed directly and abruptly his antagonist. He fought with all sorts of weapons—ludicrous comparisons and similies; if all failed, with rudeness and overbearing. He thought it necessary never to be worsted in argument. He had one virtue which I hold one of the most difficult to practise. After the heat of contest was over, if he had been informed that his antagonist resented his rudeness, he was the first to seek after a reconciliation…. That he was not thus strenuous for victory with his intimates in tA¬te-A -tA¬te conversations when there were no witnesses, may be easily believed. Indeed, had his conduct been to them the same as he exhibited to the public, his friends could never have entertained that love and affection for him which they all feel and profess for his memory.' Taylor's Reynolds, ii. 457, 462.

[301] He had written the Introduction to it. Ante, p. 317.

[302] See post, beginning of 1770.

[303] He accompanied Boswell on his tour to the Hebrides. Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 18, 1773.

[304] While he was in Scotland he never entered one of the churches. 'I will not give a sanction,' he said, 'by my presence, to a Presbyterian assembly.' Ib Aug. 27, 1773. When he was in France he went to a Roman Catholic service; post, Oct. 29, 1775.

[305] See post, March 21, 1772.

[306] See ante, ii. 82.

[307] See post, March 27, 1772.

[308] See post, May 7, 1773, Oct. 10, 1779, and June 9, 1784.

[309] St. James, v. 16.

[310] See post, June 28, 1777, note.

[311] Laceration was properly a term of surgery; hence the italics. See post, Jan. 20, 1780.

[312] See post, April 15, 1778.

[313] See Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 12, 1773.

[314] He bids us pray 'For faith that panting for a happier seat, Counts death kind nature's signal of retreat.'

[315]

'To die is landing on some silent shore, Where billows never beat, nor tempests roar, Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, 'tis o'er.'

GARTH. Quoted in Johnson's Works, vi. 61. Bacon, if he was the author of An Essay on Death, says, 'I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.' Spedding's Bacon, vi. 600. Cicero (Tuscul. Quaest. i. 8) quotes Epicharmus's saying:—'Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum nihil aestimo.'

[316] See post, beginning of 1773.

[317] See post, April 17, 1778.

[318] Perhaps on is a misprint for or.

[319] Johnson says of Blackmore (Works, viii. 36) that 'he is one of those men whose lot it has been to be much oftener mentioned by enemies than by friends.'

[320] This account Johnson says he had from an eminent bookseller, who had it from Ambrose Philips the poet. 'The relation of Philips,' he adds, 'I suppose was true; but when all reasonable, all credible allowance is made for this friendly revision, the author will still retain an ample dividend of praise…. Correction seldom effects more than the suppression of faults: a happy line, or a single elegance, may perhaps be added, but of a large work the general character must always remain.' Works, viii. 41.

[321] An acute correspondent of the European Magazine, April, 1792, has completely exposed a mistake which has been unaccountably frequent in ascribing these lines to Blackmore, notwithstanding that Sir Richard Steele, in that very popular work, The Spectator, mentions them as written by the Authour of The British Princes, the Honourable Edward Howard. The correspondent above mentioned, shews this mistake to be so inveterate, that not only I defended the lines as Blackmore's, in the presence of Dr. Johnson, without any contradiction or doubt of their authenticity, but that the Reverend Mr. Whitaker has asserted in print, that he understands they were suppressed in the late edition or editions of Blackmore. 'After all (says this intelligent writer) it is not unworthy of particular observation, that these lines so often quoted do not exist either in Blackmore or Howard.' In The British Princes, 8vo. 1669, now before me, p. 96, they stand thus:—

'A vest as admired Voltiger had on, Which, from this Island's foes, his grandsire won, Whose artful colour pass'd the Tyrian dye, Oblig'd to triumph in this legacy.'

It is probable, I think, that some wag, in order to make Howard still more ridiculous than he really was, has formed the couplet as it now circulates. BOSWELL. Swift in his Poetry: A Rhapsody, thus joins Howard and Blackmore together:—

'Remains a difficulty still, To purchase fame by writing ill. From Flecknoe down to Howard's time How few have reached the low sublime! For when our high-born Howard died, Blackmore alone his place supplied.'

Swift's Works (1803), xi. 296.

[322] Boswell seems to have borrowed the notion from The Spectator, No. 43, where Steele, after saying that the poet blundered because he was 'vivacious as well as stupid,' continues:—'A fool of a colder constitution would have staid to have flayed the Pict, and made buff of his skin for the wearing of the conqueror.'

[323] See ante, ii. 100, note 1.

[324] Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 97) tells how one day at Streatham 'when he was musing over the fire, a young gentleman called to him suddenly, and I suppose he thought disrespectfully, in these words:—"Mr. Johnson, would you advise me to marry?" "I would advise no man to marry, Sir," returns for answer in a very angry tone Dr. Johnson, "who is not likely to propagate understanding," and so left the room. Our companion looked confounded, and I believe had scarce recovered the consciousness of his own existence, when Johnson came back, and drawing his chair among us, with altered looks and a softened voice, joined in the general chat, insensibly led the conversation to the subject of marriage, where he laid himself out in a dissertation so useful, so elegant, so founded on the true knowledge of human life, and so adorned with beauty of sentiment, that no one ever recollected the offence except to rejoice in its consequences.' This 'young gentleman,' according to Mr. Hayward (Mrs. Piozzi's Auto. i. 69), was Sir John Lade, the hero of the ballad which Johnson recited on his death-bed. For other instances of Johnson's seeking a reconciliation, see post, May 7, 1773, and April 12 and May 8, 1778.

[325] 'The False Alarm, his first and favourite pamphlet, was written at our house between eight o'clock on Wednesday night and twelve o'clock on Thursday night. We read it to Mr. Thrale when he came very late home from the House of Commons.' Piozzi's Anec. p. 41. See also post, Nov. 26, 1774, where Johnson says that 'The Patriot was called for by my political friends on Friday, was written on Saturday.'

[326] Wilkes was first elected member for Middlesex at the General Election of March, 1768. He did not take his seat, having been thrown into prison before Parliament met. On Feb. 3, 1769, he was declared incapable of being elected, and a new writ was ordered. On Feb. 16 he was again elected, and without opposition. His election was again declared void. On March 16 he was a third time elected, and without opposition. His election was again declared void. On April 13 he was a fourth time elected by 1143 votes against 296 given for Colonel Luttrell. On the 14th the poll taken for him was declared null and void, and on the 15th, Colonel Luttrell was declared duly elected. Parl. Hist. xvi. 437, and Almon's Wilkes, iv. 4. See post, Oct. 12, 1779.

[327] The resolution of expulsion was carried on Feb. 17, 1769. Parl. Hist. xvi. 577. It was expunged on May 3, 1782. Ib xxii. 1407.

[328] In the original it is not rulers, but railers. Johnson's Works, vi. 176.

[329] How slight the change of system was is shown by a passage in Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 388. Mr. Forster mentions a 'memorial in favour of the most worthless of hack-partizans, Shebbeare, which obtained for him his pension of AL200 a year. It is signed by fifteen members of the House of Commons, and it asks for a pension "that he may be enabled to pursue that laudable inclination which he has of manifesting his zeal for the service of his Majesty and his Government"; in other words, that a rascal shall be bribed to support a corrupt administration.' Horace Walpole, in 1757 (Letters, iii. 54), described Shebbeare as one 'who made a pious resolution of writing himself into a place or the pillory, but who miscarried in both views.' He added in a note, 'he did write himself into a pillory before the conclusion of that reign, and into a pension at the beginning of the next, for one and the same kind of merit—writing against King William and the Revolution.' See also post, end of May, 1781.

[330] Johnson could scarcely be soothed by lines such as the following:—

'Never wilt thou retain the hoarded store, In virtue affluent, but in metal poor; * * * * * Great is thy prose; great thy poetic strain, Yet to dull coxcombs are they great in vain.

[331] Stockdale, who was born in 1736 and died in 1811, wrote Memoirs of his Life—a long, dull book, but containing a few interesting anecdotes of Johnson. He thought himself, and the world also, much ill-used by the publishers, when they passed him over and chose Johnson to edit the Lives of the Poets. He lodged both in Johnson's Court and in Bolt Court, but preserved little good-will for his neighbour. Johnson, in the Life of Waller (Works, vii. 194), quoting from Stockdale's Life of that poet, calls him 'his last ingenious biographer.' I. D'Israeli says that 'the bookseller Flexney complained that whenever this poet came to town, it cost him AL20. Flexney had been the publisher of Churchill's Works, and never forgetting the time when he published The Rosciad, he was speculating all his life for another Churchill and another quarto poem. Stockdale usually brought him what he wanted, and Flexney found the workman, but never the work.' Calamities of Authors, ed. 1812, ii. 314.

[332] 'I believe most men may review all the lives that have passed within their observation without remembering one efficacious resolution, or being able to tell a single instance of a course of practice suddenly changed in consequence of a change of opinion, or an establishment of determination.' Idler, No. 27. 'These sorrowful meditations fastened upon Rasselas's mind; he passed four months in resolving to lose no more time in idle resolves.' Rasselas, ch. iv.

[333] Pr. and Med. p. 95. [p. 101.] BOSWELL.

[334] See ante, i. 368.

[335] The passage remains unrevised in the second edition.

[336] Johnson had suffered greatly from rheumatism this year, as well as from other disorders. He mentions 'spasms in the stomach which disturbed me for many years, and for two past harassed me almost to distraction.' These, however, by means of a strong remedy, had at Easter nearly ceased. 'The pain,' he adds, 'harrasses me much; yet many leave the disease perhaps in a much higher degree, with want of food, fire, and covering, which I find also grievous, with all the succours that riches kindness can buy and give.' (He was staying at Mr. Thrale's) Pr. and Med. pp. 92-95. 'Shall I ever,' he asks on Easter Day, 'receive the Sacrament with tranquility? Surely the time will come.' Ib p. 99.

[337] Son of the learned Mrs. Grierson, who was patronised by the late Lord Granville, and was the editor of several of the Classicks. BOSWELL.

[338]

'Pontificum libros, annosa volumina vatum, Dictitet Albano Musas in monte locutas.' 'Then swear transported that the sacred Nine Pronounced on Alba's top each hallowed line.'

FRANCIS. Horace, Epis. II. i. 26.

[339] See ante, i. 131, where Boswell says that 'Johnson afterwards honestly acknowledged the merit of Walpole.'

[340] See post, May 15, 1783.

[341] 'His acquaintance was sought by persons of the first eminence in literature; and his house, in respect of the conversations there, became an academy.' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 329. See ante, i. 247, 350, note 3.

[342] Probably Madame de Boufflers. See post, under November 12, 1775.

[343] 'To talk in publick, to think in solitude, to read and hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar.' Rasselas, ch. viii. Miss Burney mentions an amusing instance of a consultation by letter. 'The letter was dated from the Orkneys, and cost Dr. Johnson eighteen pence. The writer, a clergyman, says he labours under a most peculiar misfortune, for which he can give no account, and which is that, though he very often writes letters to his friends and others, he never gets any answers. He entreats, therefore, that Dr. Johnson will take this into consideration, and explain to him to what so strange a thing may be attributed.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, ii. 96.

[344] 'How he [Swift] spent the rest of his time, and how he employed his hours of study, has been inquired with hopeless curiosity. For who can give an account of another's studies? Swift was not likely to admit any to his privacies, or to impart a minute account of his business or his leisure.' Johnson's Works, viii. 208.

[345] See post, March 31, 1772.

[346] 'He loved the poor,' says Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 84), 'as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy. "What signifies," says some one, "giving half-pence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco." "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?" says Johnson.' The harm done by this indiscriminate charity had been pointed out by Fielding in his Covent Garden Journal for June 2, 1752. He took as the motto for the paper:

'O bone, ne te Frustrere, insanis et tu';

which he translates, 'My good friend, do not deceive thyself; for with all thy charity thou also art a silly fellow.' 'Giving our money to common beggars,' he describes as 'a kind of bounty that is a crime against the public.' Fielding's Works, x. 77, ed. 1806. Johnson once allowed (post, 1780, in Mr. Langton's Collection) that 'one might give away AL500 a year to those that importune in the streets, and not do any good.' See also post, Oct. 10, 1779.

[347] He was once attacked, though whether by robbers is not made clear. See post, under Feb. 7, 1775.

[348] Perhaps it was this class of people which is described in the following passage:—'It was never against people of coarse life that his contempt was expressed, while poverty of sentiment in men who considered themselves to be company for the parlour, as he called it, was what he would not bear.' Piozzi's Anec. 215.

[349] See ante, i. 320, for one such offer.

[350] See ante, i. 163, note 1, and post, March 30, 1781.

[351] Dr. T. Campbell, in his Survey of the South of Ireland, ed. 1777 (post, April 5, 1775), says:—'By one law of the penal code, if a Papist have a horse worth fifty, or five hundred pounds, a Protestant may become the purchaser upon paying him down five. By another of the same code, a son may say to his father, "Sir, if you don't give me what money I want, I'll turn discoverer, and in spite of you and my elder brother too, on whom at marriage you settled your estate, I shall become heir,"' p. 251. Father O'Leary, in his Remarks on Wesley's Letter, published in 1780 (post, Hebrides, Aug. 15, 1773), says (p. 41):—'He has seen the venerable matron, after twenty-four years' marriage, banished from the perjured husband's house, though it was proved in open court that for six months before his marriage he went to mass. But the law requires that he should be a year and a day of the same religion.' Burke wrote in 1792: 'The Castle [the government in Dublin] considers the out-lawry (or what at least I look on as such) of the great mass of the people as an unalterable maxim in the government of Ireland.' Burke's Corres., iii. 378. See post, ii. 130, and May 7, 1773, and Oct. 12, 1779.

[352] See post, just before Feb. 18, 1775.

[353] 'Of Sheridan's writings on elocution, Johnson said, they were a continual renovation of hope, and an unvaried succession of disappointments.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 197. See post, May 17, 1783.

[354] In 1753, Jonas Hanway published his Travels to Persia.

[355] 'Though his journey was completed in eight days he gave a relation of it in two octavo volumes.' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 352. See ante, i. 313.

[356] See ante, i. 68, and post, June 9, 1784, note, where he varies the epithet, calling it 'the best piece of parenetic divinity.'

[357] '"I taught myself," Law tells us, "the high Dutch language, on purpose to know the original words of the blessed Jacob."' Overton's Life of Law, p. 181. Behmen, or BAÂhme, the mystic shoemaker of Gorlitz, was born in 1575, and died in 1624. 'His books may not hold at all honourable places in libraries; his name may be ridiculous. But he was a generative thinker. What he knew he knew for himself. It was not transmitted to him, but fought for.' F.D. Maurice's Moral and Meta. Phil. ii. 325. Of Hudibras's squire, Ralph, it was said:

'He Anthroposophus, and Floud, And Jacob Behmen understood.'

Hudibras, I. i. 541.

Wesley (Journal, i. 359) writes of Behmen's Mysteriun Magnum, 'I can and must say thus much (and that with as full evidence as I can say two and two make four) it is most sublime nonsense, inimitable bombast, fustian not to be paralleled.'

[358] 'He heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter,' 2 Corinthians, xii. 4.

[359] See ante, i. 458. In Humphry Clinker, in the Letter of June 11, the turnkey of Clerkenwell Prison thus speaks of a Methodist:—'I don't care if the devil had him; here has been nothing but canting and praying since the fellow entered the place. Rabbit him! the tap will be ruined—we han't sold a cask of beer nor a dozen of wine, since he paid his garnish—the gentlemen get drunk with nothing but your damned religion.'

[360] 'John Wesley probably paid more for turnpikes than any other man in England, for no other person travelled so much.' Southey's Wesley, i. 407. 'He tells us himself, that he preached about 800 sermons in a year.' Ib ii. 532. In one of his Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion, he asks:—'Can you bear the summer sun to beat upon your naked head? Can you suffer the wintry rain or wind, from whatever quarter it blows? Are you able to stand in the open air, without any covering or defence, when God casteth abroad his snow like wool, or scattereth his hoar-frost like ashes? And yet these are some of the smallest inconveniences which accompany field-preaching. For beyond all these, are the contradiction of sinners, the scoffs both of the great vulgar and the small; contempt and reproach of every kind—often more than verbal affronts—stupid, brutal violence, sometimes to the hazard of health, or limbs, or life. Brethren, do you envy us this honour? What, I pray you, would buy you to be a field-preacher? Or what, think you, could induce any man of common sense to continue therein one year, unless he had a full conviction in himself that it was the will of God concerning him?' Southey's Wesley, i. 405.

[361] Stockdale reported to Johnson, that Pope had told Lyttelton that the reason why he had not translated Homer into blank verse was 'that he could translate it more easily into rhyme. "Sir," replied Johnson, "when the Pope said that, he knew that he lied."' Stockdale's Memoirs, ii. 44. In the Life of Somervile, Johnson says:—'If blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled prose.' Johnson's Works, viii. 95. See post beginning of 1781.

[362] Ephesians, v. 20.

[363] In the original—'Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain' See post June 12, 1784.

[364] See post under Aug 29, 1783, and Boswell's Hebrides Oct 14, 1773.

[365] 'The chief glory of every people arises from its authours.' Johnson's Works, v 49.

[366] In a Discourse by Sir William Jones, addressed to the Asiatick Society [in Calcutta], Feb. 24, 1785, is the following passage:—

'One of the most sagacious men in this age who continues, I hope, to improve and adorn it, Samuel Johnson [he had been dead ten weeks], remarked in my hearing, that if Newton had flourished in ancient Greece, he would have been worshipped as a Divinity.' MALONE. Johnson, in An Account of an Attempt to ascertain the Longitude (Works, v, 299), makes the supposed author say:—'I have lived till I am able to produce in my favour the testimony of time, the inflexible enemy of false hypotheses; the only testimony which it becomes human understanding to oppose to the authority of Newton.'

[367] Murphy (Life, p. 91) places the scene of such a conversation in the house of the Bishop of Salisbury. 'Boscovitch,' he writes, 'had a ready current flow of that flimsy phraseology with which a priest may travel through Italy, Spain, and Germany. Johnson scorned what he called colloquial barbarisms. It was his pride to speak his best. He went on, after a little practice, with as much facility as if it was his native tongue. One sentence this writer well remembers. Observing that Fontenelle at first opposed the Newtonian philosophy, and embraced it afterwards, his words were:—"Fontenellus, ni fallor, in extrema senectute fuit transfuga ad castra Newtoniana."' See post, under Nov. 12, 1775. Boscovitch, the Jesuit astronomer, was a professor in the University of Pavia. When Dr. Burney visited him, 'he complained very much of the silence of the English astronomers, who answer none of his letters.' Burney's Tour in France and Italy, p. 92.

[368] See post, in 1781, the Life of Lyttelton.

[369] The first of Macpherson's forgeries was Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands. Edinburgh, 1760. In 1762, he published in London, The Works of Ossian, the son of Fingal, 2 vols. Vol. i. contained Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in six Books. See post, Jan 1775.

[370] Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 41.

[371] Perhaps Johnson had some ill-will towards attorneys, such as he had towards excisemen (ante, i. 36, note 5 and 294). In London, which was published in May, 1738, he couples them with street robbers:

'Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey.'

Works, i. 1. In a paper in the Gent. Mag. for following June (p. 287), written, I have little doubt, by him, the profession is this savagely attacked:—'Our ancestors, in ancient times, had some regard to the moral character of the person sent to represent them in their national assemblies, and would have shewn some degree of resentment or indignation, had their votes been asked for murderer, an adulterer, a know oppressor, an hireling evidence, an attorney, a gamester, or pimp.' In the Life of Blackmere (Works, viii. 36) he has a sly hit at the profession. 'Sir Richard Blackmore was the son of Robert Blackmore, styled by Wood gentleman, and supposed to have been an attorney.' We may compare Goldsmith's lines in Retaliation:—'Then what was his failing? come tell it, and burn ye,—

'He was, could he help it? a special attorney.'

See also post, under June 16, 1784.

[372] See ante, i. Appendix F.

[373] Dr. Maxwell is perhaps here quoting the Idler, No. 69, where Johnson, speaking of Bioethics on the Confronts of Philosophy, calls it 'the book which seems to have been the favourite of the middle ages.'

[374] Yet it is Murphy's tragedy of Zenobia that Mrs. Piozzi writes (Anec. p. 280):—'A gentleman carried Dr. Johnson his tragedy, which because he loved the author, he took, and it lay about our rooms some time. "Which answer did you give your friend, Sir?" said I, after the book had been called for. "I told him," replied he, "that there was too Tig and Terry in it." Seeing me laugh most violently, "Why, what would'st have, child?" said he. "I looked at nothing but the dramatis [personae], and there was Tigranes and Tiridates, or Teribaeus, or such stuff. A man can tell but what he knows, and I never got any further than the first pages."' In Zenobia two and Tigranes.

[375] Hume was one who had this idle dream. Shortly before his death one of his friends wrote:—'He still maintains that the national debt must be the ruin of Britain; and laments that the two most civilised nations, the English and French, should be on the decline; and the barbarians, the Goths and Vandals of Germany and Russia, should be rising in power and renown.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 497.

[376] Hannah More was with Dr. Kennicott at his death. 'Thus closed a life,' she wrote (Memoirs, i. 289), 'the last thirty years of which were honourably spent in collating the Hebrew Scriptures.' See also Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 16, 1773.

[377] Johnson (Works, viii. 467) says that Mallet, in return for what he wrote against Byng, 'had a considerable pension bestowed upon him, which he retained to his death.' See ante, i. 268.

[378] See ante, ii. 76.

[379] 'It is dangerous for a man and woman to suspend their fate upon each other at a time when opinions are fixed, and habits are established; when friendships have been contracted on both sides; when life has been planned into method, and the mind has long enjoyed the contemplation of its own prospects.' Rasselas, ch. xxix.

[380] Malone records that 'Cooper was round and fat. Dr. Warton, one day, when dining with Johnson, urged in his favour that he was, at least, very well informed, and a good scholar. "Yes," said Johnson, "it cannot be denied that he has good materials for playing the fool, and he makes abundant use of them."' Prior's Malone, p. 428. See post, Sept. 15, 1777, note.

[381] See post, Sept 21, 1777, and Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 22, 1773.

[382] But see ante, i. 299, where Johnson owned that his happier days had come last.

[383]

'In youth alone unhappy mortals live, But ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive; Discolour'd sickness, anxious labours come, And age, and death's inexorable doom.'

DRYDEN. Virgil, Georgics, iii. 66. In the first edition Dr. Maxwell's Collectanea ended here. What follows was given in the second edition in Additions received after the second edition was printed, i. v.

[384] To Glaucus. Clarke's translation is:—'Ut semper fortissime rem gererem, et superior virtute essem aliis.' Iliad, vi. 208. Cowper's version is:—

'That I should outstrip always all mankind In worth and valour.'

[385] Maxwell calls him his old master, because Sharpe was Master of the Temple when Maxwell was assistant preacher. CROKER.

[386] Dr. T. Campbell, in his Survey of the South of Ireland, p. 185, writes: 'In England the meanest cottager is better fed, better lodged, and better dressed than the most opulent farmers here.' See post, Oct. 19, 1779.

[387] In the vice-royalty of the Duke of Bedford, which began in Dec. 1756, 'in order to encourage tillage a law was passed granting bounties on the land carriage of corn and flour to the metropolis.' Lecky's Hist. of Eng. ii. 435. In 1773-4 a law was passed granting bounties upon the export of Irish corn to foreign countries. Ib iv. 415.

[388] See ante, i. 434.

[389] See ante, ii. 121. Lord Kames, in his Sketches of the History of Man, published in 1774, says:—'In Ireland to this day goods exported are loaded with a high duty, without even distinguishing made work from raw materials; corn, for example, fish, butter, horned cattle, leather, &c. And, that nothing may escape, all goods exported that are not contained in the book of rates, pay five per cent, ad valorem.' ii. 413. These export duties were selfishly levied in what was supposed to be the interest of England.

[390] 'At this time [1756] appeared Brown's Estimate, a book now remembered only by the allusions in Cowper's Table Talk [Cowper's Poems, ed. 1786, i. 20] and in Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace [Payne's Burke, p. 9]. It was universally read, admired, and believed. The author fully convinced his readers that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that nothing could save them; that they were on the point of being enslaved by their enemies, and that they richly deserved their fate.' Macaulay's Essays, ii. 183. Dr. J.H. Burton says:—'Dr. Brown's book is said to have run to a seventh edition in a few months. It is rather singular that the edition marked as the seventh has precisely the same matter in each page, and the same number of pages as the first.' Life of Hume, ii. 23. Brown wrote two tragedies, Barbarossa and Athelstan, both of which Garrick brought out at Drury Lane. In Barbarossa Johnson observed 'that there were two improprieties; in the first place, the use of a bell is unknown to the Mahometans; and secondly, Otway had tolled a bell before Dr. Brown, and we are not to be made April fools twice by the same trick.' Murphy's Garrick, p. 173. Brown's vanity is shown in a letter to Garrick (Garrick Corres. i. 220) written on Jan. 19, 1766, in which he talks of going to St. Petersburg, and drawing up a System of Legislation for the Russian Empire. In the following September, in a fit of madness, he made away with himself.

[391] See post, May 8, 1781.

[392] Horace Walpole, writing in May, 1764, says:—'The Earl of Northumberland returned from Ireland, where his profusion and ostentation had been so great that it seemed to lay a dangerous precedent for succeeding governors.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 417. He was created Duke in 1766. For some pleasant anecdotes about this nobleman and Goldsmith, see Goldsmith's Misc. Works, i. 66, and Forster's Goldsmith, i. 379, and ii. 227.

[393] Johnson thus writes of him (Works, viii. 207):—'The Archbishop of Dublin gave him at first some disturbance in the exercise of his jurisdiction; but it was soon discovered that between prudence and integrity he was seldom in the wrong; and that, when he was right, his spirit did not easily yield to opposition.' He adds: 'He delivered Ireland from plunder and oppression, and showed that wit confederated with truth had such force as authority was unable to resist. He said truly of himself that Ireland "was his debtor." It was from the time when he first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity.' Ib p. 319. Pope, in his Imitations of Horace, II. i. 221, says:—

'Let Ireland tell how wit upheld her cause, Her trade supported, and supplied her laws; And leave on Swift this grateful verse engraved, "The rights a Court attacked, a poet saved."'

[394] These lines have been discovered by the author's second son in the London Magazine for July 1732, where they form part of a poem on Retirement, copied, with some slight variations, from one of Walsh's smaller poems, entitled The Retirement. They exhibit another proof that Johnson retained in his memory fragments of neglected poetry. In quoting verses of that description, he appears by a slight variation to have sometimes given them a moral turn, and to have dexterously adapted them to his own sentiments, where the original had a very different tendency. In 1782, when he was at Brighthelmstone, he repeated to Mr. Metcalfe, some verses, as very characteristic of a celebrated historian [Gibbon]. They are found among some anonymous poems appended to the second volume of a collection frequently printed by Lintot, under the title of Pope's Miscellanies:—

'See how the wand'ring Danube flows, Realms and religions parting; A friend to all true Christian foes, To Peter, Jack, and Martin. Now Protestant, and Papist now, Not constant long to either, At length an infidel does grow, And ends his journey neither. Thus many a youth I've known set out, Half Protestant, half Papist, And rambling long the world about, Turn infidel or atheist.'

MALONE. See post, 1780, in Mr. Langton's Collection, and Boswell's Hebrides Aug. 27, and Oct. 28, 1773.

[395] Juvenal, Sat. iii. 1. 2.

'Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend.'

Johnson's London, 1. 3.

[396] It was published without the authors name.

[397] 'What have we acquired? What but … an island thrown aside from human use; … an island which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation.' Works, vi. 198.

[398] 'It is wonderful with what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game, a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the most successful field, but they die upon the bed of honour, "resign their lives, amidst the joys of conquest, and, filled with England's glory, smile in death." The life of a modern soldier is ill-represented by heroic fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword.

Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless, and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away.' Works, vi. 199.

[399] Johnson wrote of the Earl of Chatham:—'This surely is a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall at last dismiss him to nameless obscurity, with that equipoise of blame and praise which Corneille allows to Richelieu.' Works, vi. 197.

[400] Ephesians, vi. 12. Johnson (Works, vi. 198) calls Junius 'one of the few writers of his despicable faction whose name does not disgrace the page of an opponent.' But he thus ends his attack;—'What, says Pope, must be the priest where a monkey is the god? What must be the drudge of a party of which the heads are Wilkes and Crosby, Sawbridge and Townsend?' Ib p. 206.

[401] This softening was made in the later copies of the first edition. A second change seems to have been made. In the text, as given in Murphy's edition (1796, viii. 137), the last line of the passage stands:—'If he was sometimes wrong, he was often right.' Horace Walpole describes Grenville's 'plodding, methodic genius, which made him take the spirit of detail for ability.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 36. For the fine character that Burke drew of him see Payne's Burke, i. 122. There is, I think, a hit at Lord Bute's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir F. Dashwood (Lord Le Despencer), who was described as 'a man to whom a sum of five figures was an impenetrable secret.' Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 172, note. He himself said, 'People will point at me, and cry, "there goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared."' Ib p. 250.

[402] Boswell, I suspect, quoted this passage from hearsay, for originally it stood:—'If he could have got the money, he could have counted it' (p. 68). In the British Museum there are copies of the first edition both softened and unsoftened.

[403] Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland's Islands. BOSWELL.

[404] By comparing the first with the subsequent editions, this curious circumstance of ministerial authorship may be discovered. BOSWELL.

[405] Navigation was the common term for canals, which at that time were getting rapidly made. A writer in Notes and Queries, 6th, xi. 64, shows that Langton, as payment of a loan, undertook to pay Johnson's servant, Frank, an annuity for life, secured on profits from the navigation of the River Wey in Surrey.

[406] It was, Mr. Chalmers told me, a saying about that time, 'Married a Countess Dowager of Rothes!' 'Why, everybody marries a Countess Dowager of Rothes!' And there were in fact, about 1772, three ladies of that name married to second husbands. CROKER. Mr. Langton married one of these ladies.

[407] The Hermit of Warkworth: A Ballad in three cantos. T. Davis, 25. 6d. Cradock (Memoirs, i. 207) quotes Johnson's parody on a stanza in The Hermit:

'I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man With his hat in his hand.'

'Mr. Garrick,' he continues, 'asked me whether I had seen Johnson's criticism on the Hermit. "It is already," said he, "over half the town."'

[408] '"I am told," says a letter-writer of the day, "that Dr. Goldsmith now generally lives with his countryman, Lord Clare, who has lost his only son, Colonel Nugent."' Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 228. 'The Haunch of Venison was written this year (1771), and appears to have been written for Lord Clare alone; nor was it until two years after the writer's death that it obtained a wider audience than his immediate circle of friends.' Ib p. 230. See post, April 17, 1778.

[409] Gibbon (Misc. Works, i. 222) mentions Mr. Strahan:—'I agreed upon easy terms with Mr. Thomas Cadell, a respectable bookseller, and Mr. William Strahan, an eminent printer, and they undertook the care and risk of the publication [of the Decline and Fall], which derived more credit from the name of the shop than from that of the author…. So moderate were our hopes, that the original impression had been stinted to five hundred, till the number was doubled by the prophetic taste of Mr. Strahan.' Hume, by his will, left to Strahan's care all his manuscripts, 'trusting,' he says, 'to the friendship that has long subsisted between us for his careful and faithful execution of my intentions.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 494. See ib. p. 512, for a letter written to Hume on his death-bed by Strahan.

[410] Dr. Franklin, writing of the year 1773, says (Memoirs, i. 398):—'An acquaintance (Mr. Strahan, M.P.) calling on me, after having just been at the Treasury, showed me what he styled a pretty thing, for a friend of his; it was an order for AL150, payable to Dr. Johnson, said to be one half of his yearly pension.'

[411] See post, July 27, 1778.

[412] Hawkins (Life, p. 513) says that Mr. Thrale made the same attempt. 'He had two meetings with the ministry, who at first seemed inclined to find Johnson a seat.' 'Lord Stowell told me,' says Mr. Croker, 'that it was understood amongst Johnson's friends that Lord North was afraid that Johnson's help (as he himself said of Lord Chesterfield's) might have been sometimes embarrassing. "He perhaps thought, and not unreasonably," added Lord Stowell, "that, like the elephant in the battle, he was quite as likely to trample down his friends as his foes."' Lord Stowell referred to Johnson's letter to Chesterfield (ante, i. 262), in which he describes a patron as 'one who encumbers a man with help.'

[413] Boswell married his cousin Margaret Montgomerie on Nov. 25, 1769. On the same day his father married for the second time. Scots Mag. for 1769, p. 615. Boswell, in his Letter to the People of Scotland (p. 55), published in 1785, describes his wife as 'a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, whom I love, after fifteen years, as on the day when she gave me her hand.' See his Hebrides, Aug. 14, 1773.

[414]

'Musis amicus, tristitiam et metus Tradam, &c.

While in the Muse's friendship blest, Nor fear, nor grief, shall break my rest; Bear them, ye vagrant winds, away, And drown them in the Cretan Sea.'

FRANCIS. Horace, Odes, i. 26. I.

[415] Horace. Odes, i. 22. 5.

[416] Lord Elibank wrote to Boswell two years later:—'Old as I am, I shall be glad to go five hundred miles to enjoy a day of Mr. Johnson's company.' Boswell's Hebrides under date of Sept. 12, 1773. See ib. Nov. 10, and post, April 5, 1776.

[417] Goldsmith wrote to Langton on Sept. 7, 1771:—'Johnson has been down upon a visit to a country parson, Doctor Taylor, and is returned to his old haunts at Mrs. Thrale's.' Goldsmith's Misc. Works, i. 93.

[418] While Miss Burney was examining a likeness of Johnson, 'he no sooner discerned it than he began see-sawing for a moment or two in silence; and then, with a ludicrous half-laugh, peeping over her shoulder, he called out:—"Ah, ha! Sam Johnson! I see thee!—and an ugly dog thou art!"' Memoirs of Dr. Burney, ii. 180. In another passage (p. 197), after describing 'the kindness that irradiated his austere and studious features into the most pleased and pleasing benignity,' as he welcomed her and her father to his house, she adds that a lady who was present often exclaimed, 'Why did not Sir Joshua Reynolds paint Dr. Johnson when he was speaking to Dr. Burney or to you?'

[419] 'Johnson,' wrote Beattie from London on Sept. 8 of this year, 'has been greatly misrepresented. I have passed several entire days with him, and found him extremely agreeable.' Beattie's Life, ed. 1824, p. 120.

[420] He was preparing the fourth edition, See _post, March 23, 1772.

[421] 'Sept. 18, 1771, 9 at night. I am now come to my sixty-third year. For the last year I have been slowly recovering both from the violence of my last illness, and, I think, from the general disease of my life: … some advances I hope have been made towards regularity. I have missed church since Easter only two Sundays…. But indolence and indifference has [sic] been neither conquered nor opposed.' Pr. and Med. p. 104.

[422] 'Let us search and try our ways.' Lamentations iii. 40.

[423] Pr. and Med. p. 101 [105]. BOSWELL.

[424] Boswell forgets the fourth edition of his Dictionary. Johnson, in Aug. 1771 (ante, p. 142), wrote to Langton:—'I am engaging in a very great work, the revision of my Dictionary.' In Pr. and Med. p. 123, at Easter, 1773, as he 'reviews the last year,' he records:—'Of the spring and summer I remember that I was able in those seasons to examine and improve my Dictionary, and was seldom withheld from the work but by my own unwillingness.'

[425] Thus translated by a friend:—

'In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove, This Goat, who twice the world had traversed round, Deserving both her masters care and love, Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.'

BOSWELL.

[426] Cockburn (Life of Jeffrey, i. 4) says that the High School of Edinburgh, in 1781, 'was cursed by two under master, whose atrocities young men cannot be made to believe, but old men cannot forget, and the criminal law would not now endure.'

[427] Mr. Langton married the Countess Dowager of Rothes. BOSWELL.

[428] From school. See ante, ii. 62.

[429] See ante, i. 44.

[430] Johnson used to say that schoolmasters were worse than the Egyptian task-masters of old. 'No boy,' says he, 'is sure any day he goes to school to escape a whipping. How can the schoolmaster tell what the boy has really forgotten, and what he has neglected to learn?' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 209. 'I rejoice,' writes J. S. Mill (Auto. p. 53), 'in the decline of the old, brutal, and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them.'

[431] See ante, i. 373.

[432] See ante, ii. 74.

[433] The ship in which Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander were to have sailed was the Endeavour. It was, they said, unfit for the voyage. The Admiralty altered it in such a way as to render it top-heavy. It was nearly overset on going down the river. Then it was rendered safe by restoring it to its former condition. When the explorers raised their former objections, they were told to take it or none. Ann. Reg. xv. 108. See also Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 18, 1773.

[434] I suspect that Raleigh is here an error of Mr. Boswell's pen for Drake. CROKER. Johnson had written Drake's Life, and therefore must have had it well in mind that it was Drake who went round the world.

[435] Romeo and Juliet, act v. sc. 1.

[436] 'TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ.

'Edinburgh, May 3, 1792.

'MY DEAR SIR,

'As I suppose your great work will soon be reprinted, I beg leave to trouble you with a remark on a passage of it, in which I am a little misrepresented. Be not alarmed; the misrepresentation is not imputable to you. Not having the book at hand, I cannot specify the page, but I suppose you will easily find it. Dr. Johnson says, speaking of Mrs. Thrale's family, "Dr. Beattie sunk upon us that he was married, or words to that purpose." I am not sure that I understand sunk upon us, which is a very uncommon phrase, but it seems to me to imply, (and others, I find, have understood it in the same sense,) studiously concealed from us his being married. Now, Sir, this was by no means the case. I could have no motive to conceal a circumstance, of which I never was nor can be ashamed; and of which Dr. Johnson seemed to think, when he afterwards became acquainted with Mrs. Beattie, that I had, as was true, reason to be proud. So far was I from concealing her, that my wife had at that time almost as numerous an acquaintance in London as I had myself; and was, not very long after, kindly invited and elegantly entertained at Streatham by Mr. and Mrs. Thrale.

'My request, therefore, is, that you would rectify this matter in your new edition. You are at liberty to make what use you please of this letter.

'My best wishes ever attend you and your family. Believe me to be, with the utmost regard and esteem, dear Sir,

'Your obliged and affectionate humble servant, J. BEATTIE.'

I have, from my respect for my friend Dr. Beattie, and regard to his extreme sensibility, inserted the foregoing letter, though I cannot but wonder at his considering as any imputation a phrase commonly used among the best friends. BOSWELL. Mr. Croker says there was a cause for the 'extreme sensibility.' 'Dr. Beattie was conscious that there was something that might give a colour to such an imputation. It became known, shortly after the date of this letter, that the mind of Mrs. Beattie had become deranged.' Beattie would have found in Johnson's Dictionary an explanation of sunk upon us—'To sink. To suppress; to conceal. "If sent with ready money to buy anything, and you happen to be out of pocket, sink the money and take up the goods on account."' Swift's Rules to Servants, Works, viii. 256.

[437] See ante, i 450.

[438] See ante, ii. 10.

[439] See Post, April 15, 1778, note, and June 12, 1784.

[440] See ante, i. 405.

[441] St. John, xv. 24

[442] See note, p. 51 of this volume. BOSWELL.

[443] See ante, ii. 105.

[444] The petition was presented on Feb. 6 of this year. By a majority thrown of 217 to 71 leave was refused for it to be brought up. Parl. Hist. xvii. 245-297. Gibbon, in a letter dated Feb. 8, 1772 (Misc. Works, ii. 74), congratulates Mr. Holroyd 'on the late victory of our dear mamma, the Church of England. She had, last Thursday, 71 rebellious sons, who pretended to set aside her will on account of insanity; but 217 worthy champions, headed by Lord North, Burke, and Charles Fox, though they allowed the thirty-nine clauses of her testament were absurd and unreasonable, supported the validity of it with infinite humour. By the by, Charles Fox prepared himself for that holy war by passing twenty-two hours in the pious exercise of hazard; his devotion cost him only about AL500 per hour—in all, AL11,000.' See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 19, 1773.

[445] 'Lord George Germayne,' writes Horace Walpole, 'said that he wondered the House did not take some steps on this subject with regard to the Universities, where boys were made to subscribe to the Articles without reading them—a scandalous abuse.' Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 11.

[446] See ante, ii. 104.

[447] Burke had thus answered Boswell's proposal:—'What is that Scripture to which they are content to subscribe? The Bible is a vast collection of different treatises; a man who holds the divine authority of one may consider the other as merely human. Therefore, to ascertain Scripture you must have one Article more, and you must define what that Scripture is which you mean to teach.' Parl. Hist. xvii. 284.

[448] Dr. Nowell (post, June 11, 1784) had this year preached the fast sermon before the House of Commons on Jan. 30, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, and received the usual vote of thanks. Parl. Hist. xvii. 245. On Feb. 25 the entry of the vote was, without a division, ordered to be expunged. On the publication of the sermon it had been seen that Nowell had asserted that George III was endued with the same virtues as Charles I, and that the members of the House were the descendants of those who had opposed that King. Ib p. 313, and Ann. Reg. xv. 79. On March 2, Mr. Montague moved for leave to bring in a bill to abolish the fast, but it was refused by 125 to 97. Parl. Hist. xvii. 319. The fast was abolished in 1859—thirteen years within the century that Johnson was ready to allow it. 'It is remarkable,' writes Horace Walpole, 'that George III had never from the beginning of his reign gone to church on the 30th of January, whereas George II always did.' Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 41.

[449] This passage puzzled Mr. Croker and Mr. Lockhart. The following extract from the Gent. Mag. for Feb. 1772, p. 92, throws light on Johnson's meaning:—'This, say the opposers of the Bill, is putting it in the King's power to change the order of succession, as he may for ever prevent, if he is so minded, the elder branches of the family from marrying, and therefore may establish the succession in the younger. Be this as it may, is it not, in fact, converting the holy institution of marriage into a mere state contract?' See also the Protest of fourteen of the peers in Parl. Hist. xvii. 391, and post, April 15, 1773. Horace Walpole ends his account of the Marriage Bill by saying:—'Thus within three weeks were the Thirty-nine Articles affirmed and the New Testament deserted.' Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 37. How carelessly this Act was drawn was shown by Lord Eldon, when Attorney-General, in the case of the marriage of the Duke of Sussex to Lady Augusta Murray. 'Lord Thurlow said to me angrily at the Privy Council, "Sir, why have you not prosecuted under the Act of Parliament all the parties concerned in this abominable marriage?" To which I answered, "That it was a very difficult business to prosecute—that the Act had been drawn by Lord Mansfield and Mr. Attorney-General Thurlow, and Mr. Solicitor-General Wedderburne, and unluckily they had made all parties present at the marriage guilty of felony; and as nobody could prove the marriage except a person who had been present at it, there could be no prosecution, because nobody present could be compelled to be a witness." This put an end to the matter.' Twiss's Eldon, i. 234.

[450] See post, May 9, 1773, and May 13, 1778.

[451] See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 25, 1773, where Johnson, discussing the same question, says:—'There is generally a scoundrelism about a low man.'

[452] Mackintosh told Mr. Croker that this friend was Mr. Cullen, afterwards a judge by the name of Lord Cullen. In Boswelliana (pp. 250-2), Boswell mentions him thrice, and always as 'Cullen the mimick.' His manner, he says, was wretched, and his physiognomy worse than Wilkes's. Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 268) says that 'Cullen possessed the talent of mimicry beyond all mankind; for his was not merely an exact imitation of voice and manner of speaking, but a perfect exhibition of every man's manner of thinking on every subject.' Carlyle mentions two striking instances of this.

[453] See post, May 15, 1776.

[454] 'The prince of Dublin printers,' as Swift called him. Swift's Works (1803), xviii. 288. He was taken off by Foote under the name of Peter Paragraph, in The Orators, the piece in which he had meant to take off Johnson (ante, ii. 95). 'Faulkner consoled himself (pending his prosecution of the libeller) by printing the libel, and selling it most extensively.' Forster's Goldsmith, i. 287. See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 29.

[455] Faulkner had lost one of his legs. 'When Foote had his accident (ante, ii. 95), "Now I shall take off old Faulkner indeed to the life," was the first remark he made when what he had to suffer was announced to him.' Forster's Essays, ii. 400.

[456] A writer in the Monthly Review, lxxvi. 374 (no doubt Murphy), says:—'A large number of friends such as Johnson, Mr. Burke, and Mr. Murphy dined at Garrick's at Christmas, 1760. Foote was then in Dublin. It was said at table that he had been horse-whipped by an apothecary for taking him off upon the stage. "But I wonder," said Garrick, "that any man would show so much resentment to Foote; nobody ever thought it worth his while to quarrel with him in London." "And I am glad," said Johnson, "to find that the man is rising in the world." The anecdote was afterwards told to Foote, who in return gave out that he would in a short time produce the Caliban of literature on the stage. Being informed of this design, Johnson sent word to Foote, that, the theatre being intended for the reformation of vice, he would go from the boxes on the stage, and correct him before the audience, Foote abandoned the design. No ill-will ensued.'

[457] See post, May 15, 1776, where Johnson says:—'I turned Boswell loose at Lichfield, my native city, that he might see for once real civility.

[458] In my list of Boswell's projected works (ante, i. 225, note 2) I have omitted this.

[459] See post, April 7, 1775.

[460] Boswell visited Ireland in the summer of 1760. Prior's Goldsmith, i. 450.

[461] Puffendorf states that 'tutors and schoolmasters have a right to the moderate use of gentle discipline over their pupils'—viii. 3-10; adding, rather superfluously, Grotius's caveat, that 'it shall not extend to a power of death.' CROKER.

[462] The brother of Sir J. Macdonald, mentioned ante, i. 449. Johnson visited him in the Isle of Skye. 'He had been very well pleased with him in London, but he was dissatisfied at hearing heavy complaints of rents racked, and the people driven to emigration.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 2, 1773. He reproached him also with meanness as a host.

[463] Lord Campbell (Lives of the Chancellors, v. 449) points out that this conversation followed close on the appointment of 'the incompetent Bathurst' as Chancellor. 'Such a conversation,' he adds, 'would not have occurred during the chancellorship of Lord Hardwicke or Lord Somers.'

[464]

'But if at first he minds his hits, And drinks champagne among the wits,' &c.

Prior's Chameleon, 1. 39.

[465] 'Plain truth, dear Murray, needs no flowers of speech.' Pope thus addresses him in Epistle vi. Book i. of his Imitations of Horace, which he dedicated to him.

[466] See ante, 386.

[467] See post, March 23, 1776.

[468] Afterwards Lord Ashburton. Described by Johnson (post, July 22, 1777), as 'Mr. Dunning, the great lawyer.'

[469] 'Having cleared his tongue from his native pronunciation, so as to be no longer distinguished as a Scot, he seems inclined to disencumber himself from all adherences of his original, and took upon him to change his name from Scotch Malloch to English Mallet, without any imaginable reason of preference which the eye or ear can discover. What other proofs he gave of disrespect to his native country I know not, but it was remarked of him that he was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend.' Johnson's Works, viii. 464. See ante, i. 268, and post, April 28, 1783.

[470] Mr. Love was, so far as is known, the first who advised Boswell to keep a journal. When Boswell was but eighteen, writing of a journey he had taken, he says: 'I kept an exact journal, at the particular desire of my friend, Mr. Love, and sent it to him in sheets every post.' Letters of Boswell, p. 8.

[471] 'That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.' Hamlet, iii. 2.

[472] Jeffrey wrote from Oxford, where he spent nine months in 1791-2:—'The only part of a Scotchman I mean to abandon is the language, and language is all I expect to learn in England.' (Cockburn's Jeffrey, i. 46). His biographer says:—'He certainly succeeded in the abandonment of his habitual Scotch. The change was so sudden and so complete, that it excited the surprise of his friends, and furnished others with ridicule for many years…. The result, on the whole, was exactly as described by Lord Holland, who said that though Jeffrey "had lost the broad Scotch at Oxford, he had only gained the narrow English."' Cockburn, in forgetfulness of Mallet's case, says that 'the acquisition of a pure English accent by a full-grown Scotchman is fortunately impossible.'

[473] Henry Dundas, afterwards Viscount Melville. See post, under Nov. 29, 1777. Boswell wrote to Temple on May 22, 1775:—'Harry Dundas is going to be made King's Advocate—Lord Advocate at thirty-three! I cannot help being angry and somewhat fretful at this; he has, to be sure, strong parts, but he is a coarse, unlettered, unfanciful dog.' Letters of Boswell, p. 195. Horace Walpole describes him as 'the rankest of all Scotchmen, and odious for that bloody speech that had fixed on him the nick-name of Starvation! Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 479. On p. 637 he adds:—'The happily coined word "starvation" delivered a whole continent from the Northern harpies that meant to devour it.' The speech in which Dundas introduced starvation was made in 1775. Walpole's Letters, viii. 30. See Parl. Hist., xviii. 387. His character is drawn with great force by Cockburn. Life of Jeffrey, i. 77.

[474] The correspondent of Hume. See J. H. Burton's Hume, i. 320.

[475] See post, May 12, 1778.

[476] In the Plan (Works, v. 9), Johnson noticed the difference of the pronunciation of great. 'Some words have two sounds which may be equally admitted as being equally defensible by authority. Thus great is differently used:—

'For Swift and him despised the farce of state, The sober follies of the wise and great.'—POPE.

'As if misfortune made the throne her seat, And none could be unhappy but the great.'—ROWE.

In the Preface to the Dictionary (Works, v. 25), Johnson says that 'the vowels are capriciously pronounced, and differently modified by accident or affectation, not only in every province, but in every mouth.' Swift gives both rhymes within ten lines:—

'My lord and he are grown so great— Always together, tA¬te-A -tA¬te.'

* * * * *

'You, Mr. Dean, frequent the great, Inform us, will the emperor treat?' Swift's Works (1803), x. 110.

[477] 'Dr. Henry More, of Cambridge, Johnson did not much affect; he was a Platonist, and, in Johnson's opinion, a visionary. He would frequently cite from him, and laugh at, a passage to this effect:—"At the consummation of all things, it shall come to pass that eternity shall shake hands with opacity"' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 543.

[478] See post, April 17, 1778, and May 19, 1784.

[479] See ante, i. 240, and ii. 105.

[480] Revelations, xiv. 2.

[481] Johnson, in The Rambler, No. 78, describes man's death as 'a change not only of the place, but the manner of his being; an entrance into a state not simply which he knows not, but which perhaps he has not faculties to know.'

[482] This fiction is known to have been invented by Daniel Defoe, and was added to Drelincourt's book, to make it sell. The first edition had it not. MALONE. 'More than fifty editions have not exhausted its popularity. The hundreds of thousands who have bought the silly treatise of Drelincourt have borne unconscious testimony to the genius of De Foe.' Forster's Essays, ii. 70.

[483] See ante, i. 29.

[484] In his Life of Akenside ( Works, viii. 475) he says:—'Of Akenside's Odes nothing favourable can be said…. To examine such compositions singly cannot be required; they have doubtless brighter and darker parts; but when they are once found to be generally dull, all further labour may be spared; for to what use can the work be criticised that will not be read?' See post, April 10, 1776.

[485] See post, just before May 15, 1776.

[486] See post, Sept. 23, 1777.

[487] The account of his trial is entitled:—'The Grand Question in Religion Considered. Whether we shall obey God or Man; Christ or the Pope; the Prophets and Apostles, or Prelates and Priests. Humbly offered to the King and Parliament of Great Britain. By E. Elwall. With an account of the Author's Tryal or Prosecution at Stafford Assizes before Judge Denton. London.' No date. Elwall seems to have been a Unitarian Quaker. He was prosecuted for publishing a book against the doctrines of the Trinity, but was discharged, being, he writes, treated by the Judge with great humanity. In his pamphlet he says (p. 49):—'You see what I have already done in my former book. I have challenged the greatest potentates on earth, yea, even the King of Great Britain, whose true and faithful subject I am in all temporal things, and whom I love and honour; also his noble and valiant friend, John Argyle, and his great friends Robert Walpole, Charles Wager, and Arthur Onslow; all these can speak well, and who is like them; and yet, behold, none of all these cared to engage with their friend Elwall.' See post, May 7, 1773. Dr. Priestley had received an account of the trial from a gentleman who was present, who described Elwall as 'a tall man, with white hair, a large beard and flowing garments, who struck everybody with respect. He spoke about an hour with great gravity, fluency, and presence of mind.' The trial took place, he said, in 1726. 'It is impossible,' adds Priestley (Works, ed. 1831, ii. 417), 'for an unprejudiced person to read Elwall's account of his trial, without feeling the greatest veneration for the writer.' In truth, Elwall spoke with all the simple power of the best of the early Quakers.

[488] Boswell, in the Hypochrondriack (London Mag. 1783, p. 290), writing on swearing, says:—'I have the comfort to think that my practice has been blameless in this respect.' He continues (p. 293):— 'To do the present age justice, there is much less swearing among genteel people than in the last age.'

[489] 'The Life of Dr. Parnell is a task which I should very willingly decline, since it has been lately written by Goldsmith, a man of such variety of powers, and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing…. What such an author has told, who would tell again? I have made an abstract from his larger narrative, and have this gratification from my attempt, that it gives me an opportunity of paying due tribute to the memory of Goldsmith. [Greek: Togargerasesti Thanonton].' Johnson's Works, vii. 398.

[490] See ante, i. 26, and post, April 11, 1773.

[491] 'Mr. Ruffhead says of fine passages that they are fine, and of feeble passages that they are feeble; but recommending poetical beauty is like remarking the splendour of sunshine; to those who can see it is unnecessary, and to those who are blind, absurd.' Gent. Mag. May, 1769, p. 255. The review in which this passage occurs, is perhaps in part Johnson's.

[492] See ante, i. 448.

[493] See post, April 5, 1775.

[494] It was Lewis XIV who said it. 'Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mecontens et un ingrat.' Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XIV, ch. 26. 'When I give away a place,' said Lewis XIV, 'I make an hundred discontented, and one ungrateful.' Johnson's Works, viii. 204.

[495] See post, May 15, 1783.

[496] This project has since been realized. Sir Henry Liddel, who made a spirited tour into Lapland, brought two rein-deer to his estate in Northumberland, where they bred; but the race has unfortunately perished. BOSWELL.

[497] Dr. Johnson seems to have meant the Address to the Reader with a KEY subjoined to it; which have been prefixed to the modern editions of that play. He did not know, it appears, that several additions were made to The Rehearsal after the first edition. MALONE. In his Life of Dryden (Works, vii. 272) Johnson writes:—'Buckingham characterised Dryden in 1671 by the name of Bayes in The Rehearsal…. It is said that this farce was originally intended against Davenant, who in the first draught was characterised by the name of Bilboa…. It is said, likewise, that Sir Robert Howard was once meant. The design was probably to ridicule the reigning poet, whoever he might be. Much of the personal satire, to which it might owe its first reception, is now lost or obscured.'

[498] 'The Pantheon,' wrote Horace Walpole (Letters, v. 489), a year later than this conversation, 'is still the most beautiful edifice in England.' Gibbon, a few weeks before Johnson's visit to the Pantheon, wrote:—'In point of ennui and magnificence, the Pantheon is the wonder of the eighteenth century and of the British empire.' Gibbon's Misc. Works, ii. 74. Evelina, in Miss Burners novel (vol. i. Letter xxiii.) contrasts the Pantheon and Ranelagh:—'I was extremely struck on entering the Pantheon with the beauty of the building, which greatly surpassed whatever I could have expected or imagined. Yet it has more the appearance of a chapel than of a place of diversion; and, though I was quite charmed with the magnificence of the room, I felt that I could not be as gay and thoughtless there as at Ranelagh; for there is something in it which rather inspires awe and solemnity than mirth and pleasure.' Ranelagh was at Chelsea, the Pantheon was in Oxford-street. See ante, ii. 119, and post, Sept. 23, 1777.

[499] Her husband, Squire Godfrey Bosville, Boswell (post, Aug. 24, 1780), calls 'my Yorkshire chief.' Their daughter was one of the young ladies whom he passes in review in his letters to Temple. 'What say you to my marrying? I intend next autumn to visit Miss Bosville in Yorkshire; but I fear, my lot being cast in Scotland, that beauty would not be content. She is, however, grave; I shall see.' Letters of Boswell, p. 81. She married Sir A. Macdonald, Johnson's inhospitable host in Sky (ante, ii. 157).

[500] In The Adventurer, No. 120, Johnson, after describing 'a gay assembly,' continues:—'The world in its best state is nothing more than a larger assembly of beings, combining to counterfeit happiness which they do not feel.' Works, iv. 120.

[501] 'Sir Adam Fergusson, who by a strange coincidence of chances got in to be member of Parliament for Ayrshire in 1774, was the great-grandson of a messenger. I was talking with great indignation that the whole (? old) families of the county should be defeated by an upstart.' Boswelliana, p. 283.

[502] See ante, ii. 60.

[503] See ante, i. 424. Hume wrote of the judgment of Charles I. (Hist. of Eng. vii. 148):—'If ever, on any occasion, it were laudable to conceal truth from the populace, it must be confessed that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example; and that all speculative reasoners ought to observe with regard to this principle the same cautious silence which the laws in every species of government have ever prescribed to themselves.'

[504] 'All foreigners remark that the knowledge of the common people of England is greater than that of any other vulgar. This superiority we undoubtedly owe to the rivulets of intelligence [i. e. the newspapers] which are continually trickling among us, which every one may catch, and of which every one partakes.' Idler, No. 7. In a later number (30), he speaks very contemptuously of news-writers. 'In Sir Henry Wotton's jocular definition, _an ambassador is said to be a man of virtue sent abroad to tell lies for the advantage of his country. A newswriter is a man without virtue, who writes lies at home for his own profit.'

[505] See post, April 3, 1773.

[506] Probably Mr. Elphinston. See ante, i. 210, post, April 19, 1773, and April i, 1779. Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 493) wrote of a friend:—'He had overcome many disadvantages of his education, for he had been sent to a Jacobite seminary of one Elphinstone at Kensington, where his body was starved and his mind also. He returned to Edinburgh to college. He had hardly a word of Latin, and was obliged to work hard with a private tutor.'

[507] 'In progress of time Abel Sampson, probationer of divinity, was admitted to the privileges of a preacher.' Guy Mannering, chap. ii.

[508] In his Dictionary he defines heinous as atrocious; wicked in a high degree.

[509] Ephesians, v. 5.

[510] His second definition of whoremonger is one who converses with a fornicatress.

[511] It must not be presumed that Dr. Johnson meant to give any countenance to licentiousness, though in the character of an Advocate he made a just and subtle distinction between occasional and habitual transgression. BOSWELL.

[512] Erskine was born in 1750, entered the navy in 1764, the army in 1768, he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1776, was called to the Bar in 1778, was made a King's counsel in 1783, and Lord Chancellor in 1806. He died in 1823. Campbell's Chancellors, vi. 368-674.

[513] Johnson had called Churchill 'a blockhead.' Ante, i. 419. 'I have remarked,' said Miss Reynolds, 'that his dislike of anyone seldom prompted him to say much more than that the fellow is a blockhead.' Croker's Boswell, p. 834. In like manner Goldsmith called Sterne a blockhead; for Mr. Forster (Life of Goldsmith, i. 260) is, no doubt, right in saying that the author of Tristram Shandy is aimed at in the following passage in The Citizen of the World (Letter, 74):—'In England, if a bawdy blockhead thus breaks in on the community, he sets his whole fraternity in a roar; nor can he escape even though he should fly to nobility for shelter.' That Johnson did not think so lowly of Fielding's powers is shown by a compliment that he paid Miss Burney, on one of the characters in Evelina. '"Oh, Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith is the man!" cried he, laughing violently. "Harry Fielding never drew so good a character!"' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 78.