Life of Johnson Volume II Part 55

[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.' _Ra.s.selas_, 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 a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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, b.u.t.ter, 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 n.o.bleman 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, ent.i.tled _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 t.i.tle 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 G.o.d? 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstance of ministerial authorship may be discovered. BOSWELL.

[405] _Navigation_ was the common term for ca.n.a.ls, 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 ma.n.u.scripts, '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 150, payable to Dr. Johnson, said to be one half of his yearly pension.'