Life of Johnson Volume I Part 90

[1276] See _ante_, p. 336.

[1277] He used to tell, with great humour, from my relation to him, the following little story of my early years, which was literally true: 'Boswell, in the year 1745, was a fine boy, wore a white c.o.c.kade, and prayed for King James, till one of his uncles (General Cochran) gave him a s.h.i.+lling on condition that he should pray for King George, which he accordingly did. So you see (says Boswell) that _Whigs of all ages are made the same way_.' BOSWELL. Johnson, in his _Dictionary_ under _Whiggism_, gives only one quotation, namely, from Swift: 'I could quote pa.s.sages from fifty pamphlets, wholly made up of whiggism and atheism.'

See _post_, April 28, 1778, where he said: 'I have always said, the first _Whig_ was the Devil;' and Boswell's _Hebrides_, Oct. 21 and Nov.

8, 1773. To Johnson's sayings might be opposed one of Lord Chatham's in the House of Lords: 'There are some distinctions which are inherent in the nature of things. There is a distinction between right and wrong--between Whig and Tory.' _Parl. Hist_. xvi. 1107.

[1278] _Letter to Rutland on Travel_, 16mo. 1569. BOSWELL. This letter is contained in a little volume ent.i.tled, _Profitable Instructions; describing what special observations are to be taken by travellers in all nations, states and countries; pleasant and profitable. By the three much admired, Robert, late Earl of Ess.e.x, Sir Philip Sidney, and Secretary Davison. London. Printed for Benjamin Fisher, at the Sign of the Talbot, without Aldersgate_. 1633. (Lowndes gives the date of 1613, but the earliest edition seems to be this of 1633.) The letter from which Boswell quotes is ent.i.tled, _The late E. of E. his advice to the E. of R. in his Travels_. It is dated Greenwich, Jan. 4, 1596. Mr.

Spedding (Bacon's _Works_, ix. 4) suggests that 'it may have been (wholly or in part) written by Bacon.'

[1279] Boswell (_Boswelliana_, p. 210) says that this 'impudent fellow'

was Macpherson.

[1280] Boswell repeated this saying and some others to Paoli. 'I felt an elation of mind to see Paoli delighted with the sayings of Mr. Johnson, and to hear him translate them with Italian energy to the Corsican heroes.' Here Boswell describes the person as 'a certain authour.'

Boswell's _Corsica_, p. 199

[1281] Boswell thus takes him off in his comic poem _The Court of Session Garland_:--

'"This cause," cries Hailes, "to judge I can't pretend, For _justice_, I percieve, wants an _e_ at the end."'

Mr. R. Chambers, in a note on this, says:--'A story is told of Lord Hailes once making a serious objection to a law-paper, an in consequence to the whole suit, on account of the word _justice_ being thus spelt.

_Traditions of Edinburgh_, ii. 161. Burke says that he 'found him to be a clever man, and generally knowing.' Burke's _Corres_. iii. 301. See _ante_ p. 267, and _post_ May 12, 1774 and Boswell's _Hebrides_, Aug. 17, 1773.

[1282] 'Ita feri ut se mori sentiat.' Suetonius, _Caligula_, chap. x.x.x.

[1283] Johnson himself was constantly purposing to keep a journal. On April 11, 1773, he told Boswell 'that he had twelve or fourteen times attempted to keep a journal of his life,' _post_, April 11, 1773. The day before he had recorded:--'I hope from this time to keep a journal.'

_Pr. and Med_. p. 124. Like records follow, as:--'Sept. 24, 1773. My hope is, for resolution I dare no longer call it, to divide my time regularly, and to keep such a journal of my time, as may give me comfort in reviewing it.' _Ib_. p. 132. 'April 6, 1777. My purpose once more is To keep a journal.' _Ib_. p. 161. 'Jan. 2, 1781. My hope is To keep a journal.' _Ib_. p. 188. See also _post_, April 14, 1775, and April 10, 1778.

[1284] Boswell, when he was only eighteen, going with his father to the [Scotch] Northern Circuit, 'kept,' he writes, 'an exact journal.'

_Letters of Boswell_, p. 8. In the autumn of 1762 he also kept a journal which he sent to Temple to read. _Ib_. p. 19.

[1285] 'It has been well observed, that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.' Johnson's _Works_, viii. 333. 'The main of life is indeed composed of small incidents and petty occurrences.' _Ib_. ii.

322. Dr. Franklin (_Memoirs_, i. 199) says:--'Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.'

[1286] Boswell wrote the next day:--'We sat till between two and three.

He took me by the hand cordially, and said, "My dear Boswell, I love you very much." Now Temple, can I help indulging vanity?' _Letters of Boswell_, p. 27. Fourteen years later Boswell was afraid that he kept Johnson too late up. 'No, Sir,' said he, 'I don't care though I sit all night with you.' _Post_, Sept. 23, 1777. See also _post_, April 7, 1779, where Johnson, speaking of these early days, said to Boswell, 'it was not the _wine_ that made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.'

[1287] Tuesday was the 19th.

[1288] 'The elder brother of the first Lord Rokeby, called long Sir Thomas Robinson, on account of his height, and to distinguish him from Sir Thomas Robinson, first Lord Grantham. It was on his request for an epigram that Lord Chesterfield made the distich:--

"Unlike my subject will I make my song, It shall be witty, and it shan't be long,"

and to whom he said in his last illness, "Ah, Sir Thomas, it will be sooner over with me than it would be with you, for I am dying by inches." Lord Chesterfield was very short.' CROKER. Southey, writing of Rokeby Hall, which belonged to Robinson, says that 'Long Sir Thomas found a portrait of Richardson in the house; thinking Mr. Richardson a very unfit personage to be suspended in effigy among lords, ladies, and baronets, he ordered the painter to put him on the star and blue riband, and then christened the picture Sir Robert Walpole.' Southey's _Life_, iii. 346. See also _ante_, p. 259 note 2, and _post_, 1770, near the end of Dr. Maxwell's _Collectanea_.

[1289] Johnson (_Works_, vi. 440) had written of Frederick the Great in 1756:--'His skill in poetry and in the French language has been loudly praised by Voltaire, a judge without exception if his honesty were equal to his knowledge.' Boswell, in his _Hypochondriacks_, records a conversation that he had with Voltaire on memory:--'I asked him if he could give me any notion of the situation of our ideas which we have totally forgotten at the time, yet shall afterwards recollect. He paused, meditated a little, and acknowledged his ignorance in the spirit of a philosophical poet by repeating as a very happy allusion a pa.s.sage in Thomson's _Seasons_--"Aye," said he, "Where sleep the winds when it is calm?"' _London Mag_. 1783, p. 157. The pa.s.sage is in Thomson's _Winter_, l. 116:--

'In what far-distant region of the sky, Hush'd in deep silence, sleep ye when 'tis calm?'

[1290] See _post_, ii. 54, note 3.

[1291] Bernard Lintot, the father, published Pope's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Over the sale of the _Odyssey_ a quarrel arose between the two men. Johnson's _Works_, viii. 251, 274. Lintot is attacked in the _Dunciad_, i. 40 and ii. 53; He was High-Sheriff for Suss.e.x in 1736--the year of his death. _Gent. Mag_. vi. 110. The son is mentioned in Johnson's _Works_, viii. 282.

[1292] 'July 19, 1763. I was with Mr. Johnson to-day. I was in his garret up four pair of stairs; it is very airy, commands a view of St.

Paul's and many a brick roof. He has many good books, but they are all lying in confusion and dust.' _Letters of Boswell_, p. 30. On Good Friday, 1764, Johnson made the following entry:--'I hope to put my rooms in order: Disorder I have found one great cause of idleness.' On his birth-day in the same year he wrote:--'To-morrow I purpose to regulate my room.' _Pr. and Med_. pp. 50, 60.

[1293] See _ante_, p. 140, and _post_, under Sept. 9, 1779.

[1294] Afterwards Rector of Mamhead, Devons.h.i.+re. He is the grandfather of the present Bishop of London. He and Boswell had been fellow-students at the University of Edinburgh, and seemed in youth to have had an equal amount of conceit. 'Recollect,' wrote Boswell, 'how you and I flattered ourselves that we were to be the greatest men of our age.' _Letters of Boswell_, p. 159. They began to correspond at least as early as 1758.

The last letter was one from Boswell on his death-bed. Johnson thus mentions Temple (_Works_, viii. 480):--'Gray's character I am willing to adopt, as Mr. Mason has done, from a letter written to my friend Mr.

Boswell by the Revd. Mr. Temple, Rector of St. Gluvias in Cornwall; and am as willing as his warmest well-wisher to believe it true.'

[1295] Johnson (_Works_, vii. 240) quotes the following by Edmund Smith, and written some time after 1708:--'It will sound oddly to posterity, that, in a polite nation, in an enlightened age, under the direction of the most literary property in 1710, whether by wise, most learned, and most generous encouragers of knowledge in the world, the property of a mechanick should be better secured than that of a scholar! that the poorest manual operations should be more valued than the n.o.blest products of the brain! that it should be felony to rob a cobbler of a pair of shoes, and no crime to deprive the best authour of his whole subsistence! that nothing should make a man a sure t.i.tle to his own writings but the stupidity of them!' See _post_, May 8, 1773, and Feb.7, 1774; and Boswell's _Hebrides_, Aug. 17 and 20, 1773.

[1296] The question arose, after the pa.s.sing of the first statute respecting literary property in 1710, whether by certain of its provisions this perpetual copyright at common law was extinguished for the future. The question was solemnly argued before the Court of King's Bench, when Lord Mansfield presided, in 1769. The result was a decision in favour of the common-law right as unaltered by the statute, with the disapproval however of Mr. Justice Yates. In 1774 the same point was brought before the House of Lords, and the decision of the court below reversed by a majority of six judges in eleven, as Lord Mansfield, who adhered to the opinion of the minority, declined to interfere; it being very unusual, from motives of delicacy, for a peer to support his own judgment on appeal to the House of Lords. _Penny Cylco_. viii. I. See _post_, Feb. 7, 1774. Lord Shelburne, on Feb 27, 1774, humourously describes the scene in the Lords to the Earl of Chatham:--'Lord Mansfield showed himself the merest Captain Bobadil that, I suppose, ever existed in real life. You can, perhaps, imagine to yourself the Bishop of Carlyle, an old metaphysical head of a college, reading a paper, not a speech, out of an old sermon book, with very bad sight leaning on the table, Lord Mansfield sitting at it, with eyes of fixed melancholy looking at him, knowing that the bishop's were the only eyes in the House who could not meet his; the judges behind him, full of rage at being drawn into so absurd an opinion, and abandoned in it by their chief; the Bishops waking, as your Lords.h.i.+p knows they do, just before they vote, and staring on finding something the matter; while Lord Townshend was close to the bar, getting Mr. Dunning to put up his gla.s.s to look at the head of criminal justice.' _Chatham Corres_. iv. 327.

[1297] See _post_ April 15 1778, note.

[1298] Dr. Franklin (_Memoirs_ iii. 178), complaining of the high prices of English books, describes 'the excessive artifices made use of to puff up a paper of verses into a pamphlet, a pamphlet into an octavo, and an octavo into a quarto with white-lines, exorbitant margins, &c., to such a degree that the selling of paper seems now the object, and printing on it only the pretence.'

[1299] Boswell was on friendly terms with him. He wrote to Erskine on Dec. 2, 1761:--'I am just now returned from eating a most excellent pig with the most magnificent Donaldson.' _Boswell and Erskine Correspondence_, p. 20.

[1300] Dr. Carlyle (_Auto_. p. 516) says that Lord Mansfield this year (1769) 'talking of Hume and Robertson's _Histories_, said that though he could point out few or no faults in them, yet, when he was reading their books, he did not think he was reading English.' See _post_, ii. 72, for Hume's Scotticisms. Hume went to France in 1734 when he was 23 years old and stayed there three years. Hume's _Autobiography_, p. vii. He never mastered French colloquially. Lord Charlemont, who met him in Turin in 1748, says:--'His speech in English was rendered ridiculous by the broadest Scotch accent, and his French was, if possible, still more laughable.' Hardy's _Charlemont_, i. 15. Horace Walpole, who met him in Paris in 1765, writes (_Letters_, iv. 426):--'Mr. Hume is the only thing in the world that they [the French] believe implicitly; which they must do, for I defy them to understand any language that he speaks.' Gibbon (_Misc. Works_, i. 122) says of Hume's writings:--'Their careless inimitable beauties often forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.' Dr. Beattie (_Life_, p. 243) wrote on Jan. 5, 1778:--'We who live in Scotland are obliged to study English from books, like a dead language, which we understand, but cannot speak.' He adds:--'I have spent some years in labouring to acquire the art of giving a vernacular cast to the English we write.' Dr. A. Carlyle (_Auto_, p. 222) says:--'Since we began to affect speaking a foreign language, which the English dialect is to us, humour, it must be confessed, is less apparent in conversation.'

[1301] _Discours sur L'origine et les fondemens de l'inegalite parmi les hommes_, 1754.

[1302] 'I have indeed myself observed that my banker ever bows lowest to me when I wear my full-bottomed wig, and writes me Mr. or Esq., accordingly as he sees me dressed.' _Spectator_, No. 150.

[1303] Mr. Croker, quoting Mr. Wright, says:--'_See his Quantulumanque_ (sic) _concerning Money_.' I have read Petty's _Quantulumcunque_, but do not find the pa.s.sage in it.

[1304] Johnson told Dr. Burney that Goldsmith said, when he first began to write, he determined to commit to paper nothing but what was _new_; but he afterwards found that what was _new_ was false, and from that time was no longer solicitous about novelty. BURNEY. Mr. Forster (_Life of Goldsmith_, i. 421) says that this note 'is another instance of the many various and doubtful forms in which stories about Johnson and Goldsmith are apt to appear when once we lose sight of the trustworthy Boswell. This is obviously a mere confused recollection of what is correctly told by Boswell [_post_, March 26, 1779].' There is much truth in Mr. Forster's general remark: nevertheless Burney likely enough repeated to the best of his memory what he had himself heard from Johnson.

[1305] 'Their [the ancient moralists'] arguments have been, indeed, so unsuccessful, that I know not whether it can be shewn, that by all the wit and reason which this favourite cause has called forth a single convert was ever made; that even one man has refused to be rich, when to be rich was in his power, from the conviction of the greater happiness of a narrow fortune.' Johnson's _Works_, ii. 278. See _post_, June 3, 1781, and June 3, Sept. 7, and Dec. 7, 1782.

[1306] Johnson (_Works_, vi. 440) shows how much Frederick owed to 'the difficulties of his youth.' 'Kings, without this help from temporary infelicity, see the world in a mist, which magnifies everything near them, and bounds their view to a narrow compa.s.s, which few are able to extend by the mere force of curiosity.' He next points out what Cromwell 'owed to the private condition in which he first entered the world;' and continues:--'The King of Prussia brought to the throne the knowledge of a private man, without the guilt of usurpation. Of this general acquaintance with the world there may be found some traces in his whole life. His conversation is like that of other men upon common topicks, his letters have an air of familiar elegance, and his whole conduct is that of a man who has to do with men.'

[1307] See _ante_ p. 408

[1308] See _ante_, p. 298.

[1309] That this was Mr. Dempster seems likely from the _Letters of Boswell_ (p. 34), where Boswell says:--'I had prodigious satisfaction to find Dempster's sophistry (which he has learnt from Hume and Rousseau) vanquished by the solid sense and vigorous reasoning of Johnson.

Dempster,' he continues, 'was as happy as a vanquished argumentator could be.' The character of the 'benevolent good man' suits Dempster (see _post_, under Feb. 7, 1775, where Boswell calls him 'the virtuous and candid Dempster'), while that of the 'noted infidel writer' suits Hume. We find Boswell, Johnson, and Dempster again dining together on May 9, 1772.

[1310]

'Thou wilt at best but suck a bull, Or sheer swine, all cry and no wool.'

_Hudibras_, Part i. Canto I. 1. 851.

Dr. Z. Grey, in his note on these lines, quotes the proverbial saying 'As wise as the Waltham calf that went nine times to suck a bull.' He quotes also from _The Spectator_, No. 138, the pa.s.sage where the Cynic said of two disputants, 'One of these fellows is milking a ram, and the other holds the pail.'