Life of Johnson Volume III Part 59

[533] Page 89. BOSWELL.

[534] See Plott's _History of Staffordshire_, p. 88, and the authorities referred to by him. BOSWELL.

[535] See _ante_, ii. 247, and _post_, March 31, 1778.

[536] See _ante_, i. 444.

[537] Mrs. Piozzi records (_Anec_. p. 109):--'In answer to the arguments urged by Puritans, Quakers, etc. against showy decorations of the human figure, I once heard him exclaim:--"Oh, let us not be found, when our Master calls us, ripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues! ... Alas! Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one."' See _ante_, i, 405.

[538] Campbell, who was an exciseman, had in July, 1769, caught a favourite servant of Lord Eglintoune in smuggling 80 gallons of rum in one of his master's carts. This, he maintains, led to an ill-feeling. He had a right to carry a gun by virtue of his office, and from many of the gentry he had licences to shoot over their grounds. His lordship, however, had forbidden him to enter his. On Oct. 24, 1769, he pa.s.sed into his grounds, and walked along the sh.o.r.e within the sea-mark, looking for a plover. Lord Eglintoune came up with him on the sea-sands and demanded his gun, advancing as if to seize it. Campbell warned him that he would fire if he did not keep off, and kept retiring backwards or sideways. He stumbled and fell. Lord Eglintoune stopped a little, and then made as if he would advance. Campbell thereupon fired, and hit him in the side. He was found guilty of murder. On the day after the trial he hanged himself in prison. _Ann. Reg_. xiii. 219. See _ante_, ii. 66, and Boswell's _Hebrides_, Nov. 1.

[539] See _ante_, p. 40.

[540] _See ante_, ii. 10.

[541] Boswell here alludes to the motto of his Journal:--

'Oh! while along the stream of time thy name Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame; Say, shall my little bark attendant sail, Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale?'

Pope's _Essay on Man_, iv. 383.

[542]

'His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by.'

Gray's _Elegy_.

[543] Johnson, a fortnight or so later, mentions this waterfall in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, after speaking of a pool that Mr. Thrale was having dug. 'He will have no waterfall to roar like the Doctor's. I sat by it yesterday, and read Erasmus's _Militis Christiani Enchiridion_.'

_Piozzi Letters_, ii. 3.

[544] See _post_, April 9 and 30, 1778. At the following Easter he recorded: 'My memory is less faithful in retaining names, and, I am afraid, in retaining occurrences.' _Pr. and Med_. p. 170.

[545] I am told that Horace, Earl of Orford, has a collection of _Bon-Mots_ by persons who never said but one. BOSWELL. Horace Walpole had succeeded to his t.i.tle after the publication of the first edition of this book.

[546] See Macaulay's _Essays_, i. 370.

[547] Johnson (_Works_, vii. 158) tells how 'Rochester lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one and thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay.' He describes how Burnet 'produced a total change both of his manners and opinions,' and says of the book in which this conversion is recounted that it is one 'which the critick ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety.' In Johnson's answer to Boswell we have a play on the t.i.tle of this work, which is, _Some pa.s.sages of the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester_.

[548] In the pa.s.sages from Johnson's _Life of Prior_, quoted _ante_, ii. 78, note 3, may be found an explanation of what he here says.

A poet who 'tries to be amorous by dint of study,' and who 'in his amorous pedantry exhibits the college,' may be gross and yet not excite to lewdness. Goldsmith, in 1766, in a book ent.i.tled _Beauties of English Poetry Selected_, had inserted two of Prior's tales, 'which for once interdicted from general reading a book with his name upon its t.i.tle-page.' Mr. Forster hereupon remarks 'on the changes in the public taste. Nothing is more frequent than these, and few things so sudden.'

Of these changes he gives some curious instances. Forster's _Goldsmith_, ii. 4.

[549] See _ante_, iii. 5.

[550] See _ante_, i. 428.

[551] Horace, _Odes_, ii. 14.

[552] I am informed by Mr. Langton, that a great many years ago he was present when this question was agitated between Dr. Johnson and Mr.

Burke; and, to use Johnson's phrase, they 'talked their best;' Johnson for Homer, Burke for Virgil. It may well be supposed to have been one of the ablest and most brilliant contests that ever was exhibited. How much must we regret that it has not been preserved. BOSWELL. Johnson (_Works_, vii. 332), after saying that Dryden 'undertook perhaps the most arduous work of its kind, a translation of Virgil,' continues:--'In the comparison of Homer and Virgil, the discriminative excellence of Homer is elevation and comprehension of thought, and that of Virgil is grace and splendour of diction. The beauties of Homer are therefore difficult to be lost, and those of Virgil difficult to be retained.' Mr.

E.J. Payne, in his edition of Burke's _Select Works_, i. x.x.xviii, says:-- 'Most writers have constantly beside them some favourite cla.s.sical author from whom they endeavour to take their prevailing tone. Burke, according to Butler, always had a "ragged Delphin _Virgil_" not far from his elbow.'

See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Aug. 21, note.

[553] According to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'Mr. Burke, speaking of Bacon's _Essays_, said he thought them the best of his works. Dr. Johnson was of opinion that their excellence and their value consisted in being the observations of a strong mind operating upon life; and in consequence you find there what you seldom find in other books.'

Northcote's _Reynolds_, ii. 281.

[554] Mr. Seward perhaps imperfectly remembered the following pa.s.sage in the _Preface to the Dictionary_ (_Works_, v. 40):--'From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind for want of English words in which they might be expressed.'

[555] Of Mallet's _Life of Bacon_, Johnson says (_Works_, viii. 465) that it is 'written with elegance, perhaps with some affectation; but with so much more knowledge of history than of science, that when he afterwards undertook the _Life of Marlborough_, Warburton remarked, that he might perhaps forget that Marlborough was a general, as he had forgotten that Bacon was a philosopher.'

[556] It appears from part of the original journal in Mr. Anderdon's papers that the friend who told the story was Mr. Beauclerk and the gentleman and lady alluded to were Mr. (probably Henry) and Miss Harvey. CROKER. Not Harvey but Hervey. See _ante_, i. 106, and ii. 32, for another story told by Beauclerk against Johnson of Mr. Thomas Hervey.

[557] Johnson, in his _Dictionary_, gives as the 17th meaning of _make, to raise as profit from anything_. He quotes the speech of Pompey in _Measure for Measure_, act iv. sc. 3:--'He made five marks, ready money.'

But Pompey, he might reply, was a servant, and his English therefore is not to be taken as a standard.

[558] _Idea_ he defines as _mental imagination_.

[559] See _post_, May 15, 1783, note.

[560] In the first three editions of Boswell we find _Tadnor_ for _Tadmor_. In Dodsley's _Collection_, iv. 229, the last couplet is as follows:--

'Or Tadmor's marble wastes survey, Or in yon roofless cloister stray.'

[561] This is the tune that William Crotch (Dr. Crotch) was heard playing before he was two years and a half old, on a little organ that his father, a carpenter, had made. _Ann. Reg_. xxii 79.

[562] See _ante_, under Dec. 17, 1775.

[563] In 1757 two battalions of Highlanders were raised and sent to North America. _Gent. Mag_. xxvii. 42, 333. Boswell (_Hebrides_, Sept. 3, 1773) mentions 'the regiments which the late Lord Chatham prided himself in having brought from "the mountains of the north."'

Chatham said in the House of Lords on Dec. 2, 1777:--'I remember that I employed the very rebels in the service and defence of their country.

They were reclaimed by this means; they fought our battles; they cheerfully bled in defence of those liberties which they attempted to overthrow but a few years before.' _Parl. Hist_. xix. 477.

[564]

'Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee.'

Line 154.

[565] See _ante_, ii. 168. Boswell, when a widower, wrote to Temple of a lady whom he seemed not unwilling to marry:--'She is about seven-and-twenty, and he [Sir William Scott] tells me lively and gay-- _a Ranelagh girl_--but of excellent principles, insomuch that she reads prayers to the servants in her father's family every Sunday evening.'

_Letters of Boswell_, p. 336.

[566] Pope mentions [_Dunciad_, iv. 342],

'Stretch'd on the rack of a too easy chair.'

But I recollect a couplet quite apposite to my subject in _Virtue an Ethick Epistle_, a beautiful and instructive poem, by an anonymous writer, in 1758; who, treating of pleasure in excess, says:--

'Till languor, suffering on the rack of bliss, Confess that man was never made for this.' BOSWELL.

[567] See _post_, June 12, 1784.