Life of Johnson Volume V Part 46

[345] See _ante_, ii. 344, where Johnson says:--'A judge may be a farmer, but he is not to geld his own pigs.'

[346]

'Not to admire is all the art I know To make men happy and to keep them so.'

Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, Epistles, i. vi. 1.

[347] See _ante_, i. 461.

[348] See _ante_, iv. 152.

[349] See _ante_, iii. 322.

[350] In the _Gent. Mag._ for 1755, p. 42, among the deaths is entered 'Sir James Lowther, Bart., reckoned the richest commoner in Great Britain, and worth above a million.' According to Lord Shelburne, Lord Sunderland, who had been advised 'to nominate Lowther one of his Treasury on account of his great property,' appointed him to call on him. After waiting for some time he rang to ask whether he had come, 'The servants answered that n.o.body had called; upon his repeating the inquiry they said that there was an old man, somewhat wet, sitting by the fireside in the hall, who they supposed had some pet.i.tion to deliver to his lordship. When he went out it proved to be Sir James Lowther.

Lord Sunderland desired him to be sent about his business, saying that no such mean fellow should sit at his Treasury.' Fitzmaurice's _Shelburne_, i. 34.

[351] I do not know what was at this time the state of the parliamentary interest of the ancient family of Lowther; a family before the Conquest; but all the nation knows it to be very extensive at present. A due mixture of severity and kindness, oeconomy and munificence, characterises its present Representative. BOSWELL. Boswell, most unhappily not clearly seeing where his own genius lay, too often sought to obtain fame and position by the favour of some great man. For some years he courted in a very gross manner 'the present Representative,'

the first Earl of Lonsdale, who treated him with great brutality.

_Letters of Boswell_, pp. 271, 294, 324, and _ante_, iv. May 15, 1783.

In the _Ann. Reg._ 1771, p. 56, it is shewn how by this bad man 'the whole county of c.u.mberland was thrown into a state of the greatest terror and confusion; four hundred ejectments were served in one day.'

Dr. A. Carlyle (_Auto._ p. 418) says that 'he was more detested than any man alive, as a shameless political sharper, a domestic bashaw, and an intolerable tyrant over his tenants and dependants.' Lord Albemarle (_Memoirs of Rockingham,_ ii. 70) describes the 'bad Lord Lonsdale. He exacted a serf-like submission from his poor and abject dependants. He professed a thorough contempt for modern refinements. Gra.s.s grew in the neglected approaches to his mansion.... Awe and silence pervaded the inhabitants [of Penrith] when the gloomy despot traversed their streets.

He might have been taken for a Judge Jefferies about to open a royal commission to try them as state criminals... In some years of his life he resisted the payment of all bills.' Among his creditors was Wordsworth's father, 'who died leaving the poet and four other helpless children. The executors of the will, foreseeing the result of a legal contest with _a millionaire,_ withdrew opposition, trusting to Lord Lonsdale's sense of justice for payment. They leaned on a broken reed, the wealthy debtor "Died and made no sign."' [2 _Henry VI,_ act iii. sc.

3.] See De Quincey's _Works,_ iii. 151.

[352] 'Let us not,' he says, 'make too much haste to despise our neighbours. Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation. It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence.' _Works_, ix. 20.

[353] Note by Lord _Hailes_. 'The cathedral of Elgin was burnt by the Lord of Badenoch, because the Bishop of Moray had p.r.o.nounced an award not to his liking. The indemnification that the see obtained was, that the Lord of Badenoch stood for three days bare-footed at the great gate of the cathedral. The story is in the Chartulary of Elgin.' BOSWELL. The cathedral was rebuilt in 1407-20, but the lead was stripped from the roof by the Regent Murray, and the building went to ruin. Murray's _Handbook_, ed. 1867, p. 303. 'There is,' writes Johnson (_Works_, ix.

20), 'still extant in the books of the council an order ... directing that the lead, which covers the two cathedrals of Elgin and Aberdeen, shall be taken away, and converted into money for the support of the army.... The two churches were stripped, and the lead was shipped to be sold in Holland. I hope every reader will rejoice that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea.' On this Horace Walpole remarks (_Letters_, vii. 484):--'I confess I have not quite so heinous an idea of sacrilege as Dr. Johnson. Of all kinds of robbery, that appears to me the lightest species which injures n.o.body. Dr. Johnson is so pious that in his journey to your country he flatters himself that all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church.'

[354] I am not sure whether the Duke was at home. But, not having the honour of being much known to his grace, I could not have presumed to enter his castle, though to introduce even so celebrated a stranger. We were at any rate in a hurry to get forward to the wildness which we came to see. Perhaps, if this n.o.ble family had still preserved that sequestered magnificence which they maintained when catholicks, corresponding with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, we might have been induced to have procured proper letters of introduction, and devoted some time to the contemplation of venerable superst.i.tious state. BOSWELL. Burnet (_History of his own Times_, ii. 443, and iii. 23) mentions the Duke of Gordon, a papist, as holding Edinburgh Castle for James II. in 1689.

[355] 'In the way, we saw for the first time some houses with fruit-trees about them. The improvements of the Scotch are for immediate profit; they do not yet think it quite worth their while to plant what will not produce something to be eaten or sold in a very little time.'

_Piozzi Letters_, i. 121.

[356] 'This was the first time, and except one the last, that I found any reason to complain of a Scottish table.' Johnson's _Works_, ix. 19.

[357] The following year Johnson told Hannah More that 'when he and Boswell stopt a night at the spot (as they imagined) where the Weird Sisters appeared to Macbeth, the idea so worked upon their enthusiasm, that it quite deprived them of rest. However they learnt the next morning, to their mortification, that they had been deceived, and were quite in another part of the country' H. More's _Memoirs_, i. 50.

[358] See _ante_, p. 76.

[359] Murphy (_Life_, p. 145) says that 'his manner of reciting verses was wonderfully impressive.' According to Mrs. Piozzi (_Anec_. p. 302), 'whoever once heard him repeat an ode of Horace would be long before they could endure to hear it repeated by another.'

[360] Then p.r.o.nounced _Affleck_, though now often p.r.o.nounced as it is written. Ante, ii. 413.

[361] At this stage of his journey Johnson recorded:--'There are more beggars than I have ever seen in England; they beg, if not silently, yet very modestly.' _Piozzi Letters_, i. 122. See ante, p. 75, note 1.

[362] Duncan's monument; a huge column on the roadside near Fores, more than twenty feet high, erected in commemoration of the final retreat of the Danes from Scotland, and properly called Swene's Stone.

WALTER SCOTT.

[363] Swift wrote to Pope on May 31, 1737:--'Pray who is that Mr.

Glover, who writ the epick poem called _Leonidas_, which is reprinting here, and has great vogue?' Swift's _Works_ (1803), xx. 121. 'It pa.s.sed through four editions in the first year of its publication (1737-8).'

Lowndes's _Bibl. Man_. p. 902. Horace Walpole, in 1742, mentions _Leonidas_ Glover (_Letters_, i. 117); and in 1785 Hannah More writes (_Memoirs_, i. 405):--'I was much amused with hearing old Leonidas Glover sing his own fine ballad of _Hosier's Ghost_, which was very affecting. He is past eighty [he was seventy-three]. Mr. Walpole coming in just afterwards, I told him how highly I had been pleased. He begged me to entreat for a repet.i.tion of it. It was the satire conveyed in this little ballad upon the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole's ministry which is thought to have been a remote cause of his resignation. It was a very curious circ.u.mstance to see his son listening to the recital of it with so much complacency.'

[364] See ante, i. 125.

[365] See _ante_, i. 456, and _post_, Sept. 22.

[366] See _ante_, ii. 82, and _post_, Oct. 27.

[367] 'Nairne is the boundary in this direction between the highlands and lowlands; and until within a few years both English and Gaelic were spoken here. One of James VI.'s witticisms was to boast that in Scotland he had a town "sae lang that the folk at the tae end couldna understand the tongue spoken at the tother."' Murray's _Handbook for Scotland_, ed.

1867, p. 308. 'Here,' writes Johnson (_Works_, ix. 21), 'I first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse language.' As he heard the girl singing Erse, so Wordsworth thirty years later heard The Solitary Reaper:--

'Yon solitary Highland La.s.s Reaping and singing by herself.'

[368]

'Verse softens toil, however rude the sound; She feels no biting pang the while she sings; Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around, Revolves the sad vicissitude of things.'

_Contemplation._ London: Printed for R. Dodsley in Pall-mall, and sold by M. Cooper, at the Globe in Paternoster-Row, 1753.

The author's name is not on the t.i.tle-page. In the _Brit. Mus. Cata._ the poem is entered under its t.i.tle. Mr. Nichols (_Lit. Illus._ v. 183) says that the author was the Rev. Richard Gifford [not Giffard] of Balliol College, Oxford. He adds that 'Mr. Gifford mentioned to him with much satisfaction the fact that Johnson quoted the poem in his _Dictionary_.' It was there very likely that Boswell had seen the lines.

They are quoted under _wheel_ (with changes made perhaps intentionally by Johnson), as follows:

'Verse sweetens care however rude the sound; All at her work the village maiden sings; Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around, Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things.'

_Contemplation_, which was published two years after Gray's _Elegy_, was suggested by it. The rising, not the parting day, is described. The following verse precedes the one quoted by Johnson:--

'Ev'n from the straw-roofed cot the note of joy Flows full and frequent, as the village-fair, Whose little wants the busy hour employ, Chanting some rural ditty soothes her care.'

Bacon, in his _Essay Of Vicissitude of Things_ (No. 58), says:--'It is not good to look too long upon these turning _wheels of vicissitude_ lest we become _giddy_' This may have suggested Gifford's last two lines. _Reflections on a Grave, &c._ (_ante_, ii. 26), published in 1766, and perhaps written in part by Johnson, has a line borrowed from this poem:--

'These all the hapless state of mortals show The sad vicissitude of things below.'

Cowper, _Table-Talk_, ed. 1786, i. 165, writes of

'The sweet vicissitudes of day and night.'

The following elegant version of these lines by Mr. A. T. Barton, Fellow and Tutor of Johnson's own College, will please the cla.s.sical reader:--

Musa levat duros, quamvis rudis ore, labores; Inter opus cantat rustica Pyrrha suum; Nec meminit, secura rotam dum versat euntem, Non aliter nostris sortibus ire vices.

[369] He was the brother of the Rev. John M'Aulay (_post_, Oct. 25), the grandfather of Lord Macaulay.

[370] See _ante_, ii. 51.

[371] In Scotland, there is a great deal of preparation before administering the sacrament. The minister of the parish examines the people as to their fitness, and to those of whom he approves gives little pieces of tin, stamped with the name of the parish as _tokens_, which they must produce before receiving it. This is a species of priestly power, and sometimes may be abused. I remember a lawsuit brought by a person against his parish minister, for refusing him admission to that sacred ordinance. BOSWELL.