Life of Johnson Volume III Part 58

[496] We read in the Gospels, that those unfortunate persons who were possessed with evil spirits (which, after all, I think is the most probable cause of madness, as was first suggested to me by my respectable friend Sir John Pringle), had recourse to pain, tearing themselves, and jumping sometimes into the fire, sometimes into the water. Mr. Seward has furnished me with a remarkable anecdote in confirmation of Dr. Johnson's observation. A tradesman, who had acquired a large fortune in London, retired from business, and went to live at Worcester. His mind, being without its usual occupation, and having nothing else to supply its place, preyed upon itself, so that existence was a torment to him. At last he was seized with the stone; and a friend who found him in one of its severest fits, having expressed his concern, 'No, no, Sir, (said he) don't pity me: what I now feel is ease compared with that torture of mind from which it relieves me.' BOSWELL.

[497] See _ante_, i. 446. 'Johnson was a great enemy to the present fashionable way of supposing worthless and infamous persons mad.'

Johnson's _Works_ (1787), xi. 203.

[498] See _post_, April 1, 1779.

[499] See _post_, April 7, 1778.

[500] 'Reynolds,' writes Malone, 'was as fond of London as Dr. Johnson; always maintaining that it was the only place in England where a pleasant society might be found.' Prior's _Malone_ p. 433. Gibbon wrote to Holroyd _Misc. Works_, ii 126:--'Never pretend to allure me by painting in odious colours the dust of London. I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald it is to visit you and my Lady, and not your trees.' Burke, on the other hand, wrote (_Corres_. iii 422):--'What is London? clean, commodious, neat; but, a very few things indeed excepted, and endless addition of littleness to littleness, extending itself over a great tract of land.' 'For a young man,' he says, 'for a man of easy fortune, London is the best place one can imagine. But for the old, the infirm, the straightened in fortune, the grave in character or in disposition, I do not believe a much worse place can be found.'

_Ib_. iv. 250.

[501]

'Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine captos Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui.'

Ovid, _Ep. ex Ponto_, i. 3. 35.

[502] 'In the morn and liquid dew of youth.' _Hamlet_, act i. sc. 3.

[503] Now, at the distance of fifteen years since this conversation pa.s.sed, the observation which I have had an opportunity of making in Westminster Hall has convinced me, that, however true the opinion of Dr. Johnson's legal friend may have been some time ago, the same certainty of success cannot now be promised to the same display of merit. The reasons, however, of the rapid rise of some, and the disappointment of others equally respectable, are such as it might seem invidious to mention, and would require a longer detail than would be proper for this work. BOSWELL. Boswell began to eat his dinners in the Inner Temple in 1775. _Ante_, p. 45 note 1, and _Letters of Boswell_, p.

196. In writing to Temple he thus mentions his career as a barrister.

'Jan. 10, 1789. In truth I am sadly discouraged by having no practice, nor probable prospect of it; and to confess fairly to you, my friend, I am afraid that, were I to be tried, I should be found so deficient in the forms, the _quirks_ and the _quiddities_, which early habit acquires, that I should expose myself. Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as a barrister, still weighs upon my imagination.' _Ib_. p. 267. 'Aug. 23, 1789. The Law life in Scotland amongst vulgar familiarity would now quite destroy me. I am not able to acquire the Law of England.' _Ib_. p. 304. 'Nov. 28, 1789. I have given up my house and taken good chambers in the Inner Temple, to have the appearance of a lawyer. O Temple! Temple! is this realising any of the towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversations and letters? ... I do not see the smallest opening in Westminster Hall but I like the scene, though I have attended only one day this last term, being eager to get my _Life of Johnson_ finished.'

_Ib_. p. 314. 'April 6, 1791. When my book is launched, I shall, if I am alone and in tolerable health and spirits, have some furniture put into my chambers in the Temple, and force myself to sit there some hours a-day, and to attend regularly in Westminster Hall. The chambers cost me 20 yearly, and I may reckon furniture and a lad to attend there occasionally 20 more. I doubt whether I shall get fees equal to the expense.' _Ib_. p. 335. 'Nov. 22, 1791. I keep chambers open in the Temple, I attend in Westminster Hall, but there is not the least prospect of my having business.' _Ib_. p. 344. His chambers, as he wrote to Malone, were 'in the very staircase where Johnson lived.' Croker's _Boswell_, p. 830.

[504] Sunday was the 21st.

[505] See _ante_, March 26, 1776, and _post_, under Nov. 17, 1784.

[506] In _Notes and Queries_ for April, May, and June 1882, is a series of Johnson's letters to Taylor, between June 10, 1742 and April 12, 1784. In the first Johnson signs himself:--'Your very affectionate,'

(p. 304). On Nov. 18, 1756, he writes:--'Neither of us now can find many whom he has known so long as we have known each other.... We both stand almost single in the world,' (p. 324). On July 15, 1765, he reproaches Taylor with not writing:--'With all your building and feasting you might have found an hour in some wet day for the remembrance of your old friend. I should have thought that since you have led a life so festive and gay, you would have [invited] me to partake of your hospitality,'

(p. 383). On Oct. 19, 1779, he says:--'Write to me soon. We are both old. How few of those whom we have known in our youth are left alive!'

(p. 461). On April 12, 1784, he writes:--'Let us be kind to one another.

I have no friend now living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth,' (p. 482, and _post_, April 12, 1784). See _ante_, p. 131, for his regret on the death of his school-fellow, Henry Jackson, who seemed to Boswell (_ante_, under March 22, 1776) to be a low man, dull and untaught. 'One of the old man's miseries,' he wrote, (_post_, Feb.

3, 1778), 'is that he cannot easily find a companion able to partake with him of the past.' 'I have none to call me Charley now,' wrote Charles Lamb on the death of a friend of his boyhood (Talfourd's _Lamb_, ed. 1865, p. 145). Such a companion Johnson found in Taylor. That, on the death of his wife, he at once sent for him, not even waiting for the light of morning to come, is a proof that he had a strong affection for the man.

[507] _Ecclesiasticus_, ch. x.x.xviii. verse 25. The whole chapter may be read as an admirable ill.u.s.tration of the superiority of cultivated minds over the gross and illiterate. BOSWELL.

[508] Pa.s.sages in Johnson's Letters to Mrs. Thrale are to the same effect. 'Aug. 3, 1771. Having stayed my month with Taylor I came away on Wednesday, leaving him, I think, in a disposition of mind not very uncommon, at once weary of my stay, and grieved at my departure.'

_Piozzi Letters_, i. 52. 'July 13, 1775. Dr. Taylor and I spend little time together, yet he will not yet be persuaded to hear of parting.'

_Ib_. p. 276. 'July 26, 1775. Having stayed long enough at Ashbourne, I was not sorry to leave it. I hindered some of Taylor's diversions, and he supplied me with very little.' _Ib_ p. 287.

[509] The second volume of these Sermons, which was published in 1789, a year after the first, contains the following addition to the t.i.tle:--'To which is added a Sermon written by Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., for the Funeral of his Wife.' 'Dr. Taylor had,' writes Murphy (_Life_, p. 171), 'The LARGEST BULL in England, and some of the best Sermons.'

[510] If the eminent judge was Lord Mansfield, we may compare with Boswell's regret the lines in which Pope laments the influence of Westminster Hall and Parliament:--

'There truant Windham every muse gave o'er, There Talbot sunk, and was a wit no more.

How sweet an Ovid, Murray was our boast!

How many Martials were in Pulteney lost!'

_The Dunciad_, iv. 167.

[511] Boswell's brother David had been settled in Spain since 1768.

(_Boswelliana_, p. 5.) He therefore is no doubt the son, and Lord Auchinleck the father.

[512] See _ante_, ii. 129, and Boswell's _Hebrides_, Sept. 22, 1773.

[513] 'Jack' had not shown all his manners to Johnson. Gibbon thus describes him in 1762 (_Misc. Works_, i. 142):--'Colonel Wilkes, of the Buckinghamshire militia, dined with us. I scarcely ever met with a better companion; he has inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge; but a thorough profligate in principle as in practice, his life stained with every vice, and his conversation full of blasphemy and indecency. These morals he glories in--for shame is a weakness he has long since surmounted.' The following anecdote in _Boswelliana_ (p. 274) is not given in the _Life of Johnson_:--'Johnson had a sovereign contempt for Wilkes and his party, whom he looked upon as a mere rabble. "Sir," said he, "had Wilkes's mob prevailed against government, this nation had died of _phthiriasis_. Mr. Langton told me this. The expression, _morbus pediculosus_, as being better known would strike more."'

[514] See _ante_, p. 79, note 1.

[515] See _ante_, p. 69.

[516] See _ante_, i. 402.

[517] See _ante_, i. 167.

[518] See _post_, under Sept. 30, 1783.

[519] See _post, ib_., where Johnson told Mrs. Siddons that 'Garrick was no declaimer.'

[520] Hannah More (_Memoirs_, ii. 16) says that she once asked Garrick 'why Johnson was so often harsh and unkind in his speeches both of him and to him:--"Why," he replied, "it is very natural; is it not to be expected he should be angry that I, who have so much less merit than he, should have had so much greater success?"'

[521] Foote died a month after this conversation. Johnson wrote to Mrs.

Thrale:--'Did you see Foote at Brighthelmstone? Did you think he would so soon be gone? Life, says Falstaff, is a shuttle [_Merry Wives of Windsor_, act v. sc. 1]. He was a fine fellow in his way; and the world is really impoverished by his sinking glories. Murphy ought to write his life, at least to give the world a _Footeana_. Now will any of his contemporaries bewail him? Will genius change _his s.e.x_ to weep? I would really have his life written with diligence.' This letter is wrongly dated Oct. 3, 1777. It was written early in November. _Piozzi Letters_, i. 396. Baretti, in a marginal note on _Footeana_, says:--'One half of it had been a string of obscenities.' See _post_, April 24, 1779, note.

[522] See _ante_, i. 447.

[523] _To pit_ is not in Johnson's _Dictionary_.

[524] Very likely Mr. Langton. See _ante_, ii. 254.

[525] Two months earlier Johnson had complained that Langton's table was rather coa.r.s.e. _Ante_, p. 128.

[526] See _post_, April 13, 1781, where he again mentions this advice.

'He said of a certain lady's entertainments, "What signifies going thither? There is neither meat, drink, nor talk."' Johnson's _Works_ (1787), xi. 207.

[527] William, third Duke of Devonshire, who died in 1755. Johnson (_post_, April 1, 1779) 'commended him for a dogged veracity.' Horace Walpole records of him a fact that 'showed a conscientious idea of honesty in him. Sometime before his death he had given up to two of his younger sons 600 a-year in land, that they might not perjure themselves, if called upon to swear to their qualifications as Knights of the Shire.' _Memoirs of the Reign of George II_, ii. 86.

[528] Philip Francis wrote to Burke in 1790:--'Once for all, I wish you would let me teach you to write English. To me who am to read everything you write, it would be a great comfort, and to you no sort of disparagement. Why will you not allow yourself to be persuaded that polish is material to preservation?' Burke's _Corres_, iii. 164.

[529] Edit. 2, p. 53. BOSWELL.

[530] This is a mistake. The Ports had been seated at Islam time out of mind. Congreve had visited there, and his _seat_, that is _the bench_ on which he sometimes sat, used to be shown. CROKER. On the way to Islam, Johnson told Boswell about the dedication of his _Plan_ to Lord Chesterfield. _Ante_, i. 183, note 4.

[531] See _ante_, i. 41.

[532] 'I believe more places than one are still shown in groves and gardens where he is related to have written his _Old Bachelor_.'

Johnson's _Works_, viii. 23.