Life of Johnson Volume III Part 73

[1042] These words are quoted by Kames, iii. 267. In his abbreviation he perhaps pa.s.sed over by accident the words that Johnson next quotes.

If Clarendon did not believe the story, he wished his readers to believe it. He gives more than five pages to it, and he ends by saying:-- 'Whatever there was of all this, it is a notorious truth, that when the news of the duke's murder (which happened within few months after) was brought to his mother, she seemed not in the least degree surprised; but received it as if she had foreseen it.' According to the story, he had told her of the warning which had come to him through his father's ghost.

Clarendon's _History_, ed. 1826, i. 74.

[1043] Kames maintains (iii. 95) that schools are not needful for the children of the labouring poor. They would be needful, 'if without regular education we could have no knowledge of the principles of religion and of morality. But Providence has not left man in a state so imperfect: religion and morality are stamped on his heart; and none can be ignorant of them, who attend to their own perceptions.'

[1044] 'Oct. 5, 1764. Mr. Elliot brings us woeful accounts of the French ladies, of the decency of their conversation, and the nastiness of their behaviour.' Walpole's _Letters_, iv. 277. Walpole wrote from Paris on Nov. 19, 1765, 'Paris is the ugliest, beastliest town in the universe,' and describes the nastiness of the talk of French women of the first rank. _Ib_. p. 435. Mrs. Piozzi, nearly twenty years later, places among 'the contradictions one meets with every moment' at Paris, 'A Countess in a morning, her hair dressed, with diamonds too perhaps, and a dirty black handkerchief about her neck.' Piozzi's _Journey_, i.

17. See _ante_, ii. 403, and _post_, under Aug. 29, 1783.

[1045] See Appendix B.

[1046] His lordship was, to the last, in the habit of telling this story rather too often. CROKER.

[1047] See _ante_, ii. 194.

[1048] See _ante_, iii. 178.

[1049] See _ante_, ii. 153.

[1050] 'Our eyes and ears may convince us,' wrote Wesley, 'there is not a less happy body of men in all England than the country farmers. In general their life is supremely dull; and it is usually unhappy too; for of all people in the kingdom, they are the most discontented, seldom satisfied either with G.o.d or man.' Southey's _Wesley_, i. 420. He did not hold with Johnson as to the upper cla.s.ses. 'Oh! how hard it is,' he said, 'to be shallow enough for a polite audience.' _Ib_. p. 419.

[1051] Horne says:--'Even S. Johnson, though mistakenly, has attempted AND, and would find no difficulty with THEREFORE' (ed. 1778, p. 21).

However, in a note on p. 56 he says:--'I could never read his preface [to his _Dictionary_] without shedding a tear.' See _ante_, i. 297, note 2.

[1052] In Mr. Horne Tooke's enlargement of that _Letter_, which he has since published with the t.i.tle of [Greek: Epea pteroenta]; or, the _Diversions of Purley_; he mentions this compliment, as if Dr. Johnson instead of _several_ of his etymologies had said _all_. His recollection having thus magnified it, shews how ambitious he was of the approbation of so great a man. BOSWELL. Horne Tooke says (ed. 1798, part i, p. 156) 'immediately after the publication of my _Letter to Mr. Dunning_ I was informed by Mr. S. [Seward], an intimate friend of Dr. Johnson, that he had declared that, if he lived to give a new edition of his _Dictionary_, he should certainly adopt my derivations.' Boswell and Horne Tooke, says Stephens (_Life of Tooke_, ii. 438), had an altercation. 'Happening to meet at a gentleman's house, Mr. Boswell proposed to make up the breach, on the express condition, however, that they should drink a bottle of wine each between the toasts. But Mr.

Tooke would not give his a.s.sent unless the liquor should be brandy. By the time a quart had been quaffed Boswell was left sprawling on the floor.'

[1053] See _ante_, iii. 314. Thurlow, the Attorney-General, pressed that Horne should be set in the pillory, 'observing that imprisonment would be "a slight inconvenience to one of sedentary habits."' It was during his imprisonment that he wrote his _Letter to Mr. Dunning_. Campbell's _Chancellors_, ed. 1846, v. 517. Horace Walpole says that 'Lord Mansfield was afraid, and would not venture the pillory.' _Journal of the Reign of George III_, ii. 167.

[1054] '_Bulse_, a certain quant.i.ty of diamonds' (India). Webster's _Dictionary_.

[1055] 'He raised,' says Hawkins (_Life_, p. 236), 'the medical character to such a height of dignity as was never seen in this or any other country. I have heard it said that when he began to practise, he was a frequenter of the meeting at Stepney where his father preached; and that when he was sent for out of the a.s.sembly, his father would in his prayer insert a pet.i.tion in behalf of the sick person. I once mentioned this to Johnson, who said it was too gross for belief; but it was not so at Batson's [a coffee-house frequented by physicians]; it pa.s.sed there as a current belief.' See _ante_, i. 159. Young has introduced him in the second of his _Night Thoughts_--

'That time is mine, O Mead, to thee I owe; Fain would I pay thee with eternity.'

Horace Walpole (_Letters_, viii. 260) says 'that he had nothing but pretensions.'

[1056] On Oct. 17, 1777, Burgoyne's army surrendered to the Americans at Saratoga. One of the articles of the Convention was 'that the army should march out of the camp with all the honours of war to a fixed place where they were to deposit their arms. It is said that General Gates [the American Commander] paid so nice and delicate an attention to the British military honour that he kept his army close within their lines, and did not suffer an American soldier to be a witness to the degrading spectacle of piling their arms.' _Ann. Reg_. xx. 173, 174.

Horace Walpole, on Lord Cornwallis's capitulation in 1781, wrote:--'The newspapers on the Court side had been crammed with paragraphs for a fortnight, saying that Lord Cornwallis had declared he would never pile up his arms like Burgoyne; that is, he would rather die sword in hand.'

Walpole's _Journal of the Reign of George III_, ii. 475.

[1057] See _ante_, i. 342.

[1058] There was a Colonel Fullarton who took an important part in the war against Tippoo in 1783. Mill's _British India_, ed. 1840, iv. 276.

[1059] 'To count is a modern practice, the ancient method was to guess; and when numbers are guessed, they are always magnified.' Johnson's _Works_, ix. 95.

[1060] He published in 1714 _An Account of Switzerland_.

[1061] See _ante_, ii. 468.

[1062] See Appendix C.

[1063] 'All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future which has not been given us. They are, I think, a crime, because they resign that life to chance which G.o.d has given us to be regulated by reason; and superinduce a kind of fatality, from which it is the great privilege of our nature to be free.' _Piozzi Letters_, i. 83. Johnson (_Works_, vii. 52) praises the 'just and n.o.ble thoughts' in Cowley's lines which begin:--

'Where honour or where conscience does not bind, No other law shall shackle me; Slave to myself I ne'er will be; Nor shall my future actions be confined By my own present mind.'

See _ante_, ii. 21.

[1064] Juvenal, _Sat_. iii. 78. Imitated by Johnson in _London_.

[1065] See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Aug. 16, and Johnson's _Tour into Wales_, Aug. 1, 1774.

[1066] The slip of paper on which he made the correction, is deposited by me in the n.o.ble library to which it relates, and to which I have presented other pieces of his hand-writing. BOSWELL. In subst.i.tuting _burns_ he resumes the reading of the first edition, in which the former of the two couplets ran:--

'Resistless burns the fever of renown, Caught from the strong contagion of the gown.'

'The slip of paper and the other pieces of Johnson's hand-writing' have been lost. At all events they are not in the Bodleian.

[1067] Johnson (_Works_, vii. 76), criticising Milton's scheme of education, says:--'Those authors therefore are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians. Let me not be censured for this digression as pedantic or paradoxical; for if I have Milton against me, I have Socrates on my side. It was his labour to turn philosophy from the study of nature to speculations upon life; but the innovators whom I oppose are turning off attention from life to nature. They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of opinion that what we had to learn was how to do good and avoid evil. "[Greek: hotti toi en megaroisi kakon t agathon te tetuktai]."'

[1068] 'His ear was well-tuned, and his diction was elegant and copious, but his devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topicks enforces perpetual repet.i.tion, and the sanct.i.ty of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well.' _Ib_. viii. 386. See _ante_, i. 312. Mrs. Piozzi (_Anec_.

p. 200) says that when 'Johnson would inveigh against devotional poetry, and protest that all religious verses were cold and feeble,' she reminded him how 'when he would try to repeat the _Dies irae, dies illa_, he could never pa.s.s the stanza ending thus, _Tantus labor non sit ca.s.sus_, without bursting into a flood of tears.'

[1069] See _ante_, ii. 169, note 2.

[1070] Dr. Johnson was by no means attentive to minute accuracy in his _Lives of the Poets_; for notwithstanding my having detected this mistake, he has continued it. BOSWELL. See _post_, iv. 51, note 2 for a like instance of neglect.

[1071] See _ante_, ii. 64.

[1072] See _ante_, ii. 278.

[1073] 'May 31, 1778. We shall at least not doze, as we are used to do, in summer. The Parliament is to have only short adjournments; and our senators, instead of retiring to horseraces (_their_ plough), are all turned soldiers, and disciplining militia. Camps everywhere.' Horace Walpole's _Letters_, vii. 75. It was a threat of invasion by the united forces of France and Spain, at the time that we were at war with America, that caused the alarm. Dr. J.H. Burton (Dr. A. Carlyle's _Auto_. p. 399) points out, that while the militia of England was placed nearly in its present position by the act of 1757, yet 'when a proposal for extending the system to Scotland was suggested (sic), ministers were afraid to arm the people.' 'It is curious,' he continues, 'that for a reason almost identical Ireland has been excepted from the Volunteer organisation of a century later. It was not until 1793 that the Militia Acts were extended to Scotland.'

[1074] 'Before dinner,' wrote Miss Burney in September of this year, 'to my great joy Dr. Johnson returned home from Warley Common.' Mme.

D'Arblay's _Diary_, i. 114. He wrote to Mrs. Thrale on Oct. 15:--'A camp, however familiarly we may speak of it, is one of the great scenes of human life. War and peace divide the business of the world. Camps are the habitations of those who conquer kingdoms, or defend them.' _Piozzi Letters_, ii. 22.

[1075] Third Edition, p. 111 [Aug. 28]. BOSWELL. It was at Fort George.

'He made a very good figure upon these topicks. He said to me afterwards that "he had talked ostentatiously."'

[1076] When I one day at Court expressed to General Hall my sense of the honour he had done my friend, he politely answered, 'Sir, I did _myself_ honour.' BOSWELL.

[1077] According to Malone, 'Mr. Burke said of Mr. Boswell that good nature was so natural to him that he had no merit in possessing it, and that a man might as well a.s.sume to himself merit in possessing an excellent const.i.tution.' _European Mag_. 1798, p. 376. See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Aug. 21.

[1078] Langton. See _ante_, iii. 48.

[1079] No doubt his house at Langton.

[1080] The Wey Ca.n.a.l. See _ante_, ii. 136. From _navigation_, i.e. a ca.n.a.l for internal navigation, we have _navvy_. A _ca.n.a.l_ was the common term for an ornamental pool, and for a time it seemed that _navigation_ and not _ca.n.a.l_ might be the term applied to artificial rivers.