James Boswell - THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON - All 6 Volumes in One Edition

[343] I own it pleased me to find amongst them one trait of the manners of the age in London, in the last century, to shield from the sneer of English ridicule, which was some time ago too common a practice in my native city of Edinburgh:—

‘If what I’ve said can’t from the town affright,

Consider other dangers of the night ; When brickbats are from upper stories thrown, And emptied chamberpots come pouring down From garret windows .’

See Boswell’s Hebrides , Aug. 14, 1773, where Johnson, on taking his first walk in Edinburgh, ‘grumbled in Boswell’s ear, “I smell you in the dark.”’ I once spent a night in a town of Corsica, on the great road between Ajaccio and Bastia, where, I was told, this Edinburgh practice was universal. It certainly was the practice of the hotel.

[344] His Ode Ad Urbanum probably. NICHOLS. BOSWELL.

[345] Johnson, on his death-bed, had to own that ‘Cave was a penurious paymaster; he would contract for lines by the hundred, and expect the long hundred.’ See post , Dec. 1784.

[346] Cave sent the present by Johnson to the unknown author.

[347] See post , p. 151, note 5.

[348] The original letter has the following additional paragraph:—‘I beg that you will not delay your answer.’

[349] In later life Johnson strongly insisted on the importance of fully dating all letters. After giving the date in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, he would add,—‘Now there is a date, look at it’ ( Piozzi Letters , ii. 109); or, ‘Mark that—you did not put the year to your last’ ( Ib . p. 112); or, ‘Look at this and learn’ ( Ib . p. 138). She never did learn. The arrangement of the letters in the Piozzi Letters is often very faulty. For an omission of the date by Johnson in late life see post , under March 5, 1774.

[350] A poem, published in 1737, of which see an account under April 30, 1773—BOSWELL.

[351] The learned Mrs. Elizabeth Carter. BOSWELL. She was born Dec. 1717, and died Feb. 19, 1806. She never married. Her father gave her a learned education. Dr. Johnson, speaking of some celebrated scholar [perhaps Langton], said, ‘that he understood Greek better than any one whom he he had ever known, except Elizabeth Carter.’ Pennington’s Carter , i. 13. Writing to her in 1756 he said, ‘Poor dear Cave! I owed him much; for to him I owe that I have known you’ ( Ib . p. 40). Her father wrote to her on June 25, 1738:—‘You mention Johnson; but that is a name with which I am utterly unacquainted, Neither his scholastic, critical, or poetical character ever reached my ears. I a little suspect his judgement, if he is very fond of Martial’ ( Ib . p. 39). Since 1734 she had written verses for the Gent. Mag . under the name of Eliza ( Ib . p. 37)! They are very poor. Her Ode to Melancholy her biographer calls her best. How bad it is three lines will show:—

‘Here, cold to pleasure’s airy forms,

Consociate with my sister worms,

And mingle with the dead.’

Gent. Mag . ix. 599.

Hawkins records that Johnson, upon hearing a lady commended for her learning, said:—‘A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek. My old friend, Mrs. Carter, could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus.’ Johnson’s Works (1787), xi. 205. Johnson, joining her with Hannah More and Fanny Burney, said:—‘Three such women are not to be found.’ Post , May 15, 1784.

[352] See Voltaire’s Siécle de Louis XIV , ch. xxv..

[353] At the end of his letter to Cave, quoted post , 1742, he says:—‘The boy found me writing this almost in the dark, when I could not quite easily read yours.’ A man who at times was forced to walk the streets, for want of money to pay for a lodging, was likely also at times to be condemned to idleness for want of a light.

[354] At the back of this letter is written: ‘Sir, Please to publish the enclosed in your paper of first, and place to acc’t of Mr. Edward Cave. For whom I am, Sir, your hum. ser’t J. Bland. St. John’s Gate, April 6, 1738.’ London therefore was written before April 6.

[355] Boswell misread the letter. Johnson does not offer to allow the printer to make alterations. He says:—‘I will take the trouble of altering any stroke of satire which you may dislike.’ The law against libel was as unjust as it was severe, and printers ran a great risk.

[356] Derrick was not merely a poet, but also Master of the Ceremonies at Bath; post , May 16, 1763. For Johnson’s opinion of his ‘Muse’ see post under March 30, 1783. Fortune, a Rhapsody , was published in Nov. 1751. Gent. Mag . xxi. 527. He is described in Humphrey Clinker in the letters of April 6 and May 6.

[357] See post , March 20, 1776.

[358] Six years later Johnson thus wrote of Savage’s Wanderer :—‘From a poem so diligently laboured, and so successfully finished, it might be reasonably expected that he should have gained considerable advantage; nor can it without some degree of indignation and concern be told, that he sold the copy for ten guineas.’ Johnson’s Works , viii. 131. Mrs. Piozzi sold in 1788 the copyright of her collection of Johnson’s Letters for £500; post , Feb. 1767.

[359] The Monks of Medmenham Abbey. See Almon’s Life of Wilkes , iii. 60, for Wilkes’s account of this club. Horace Walpole ( Letters , i. 92) calls Whitehead ‘an infamous, but not despicable poet.’

[360] From The Conference , Churchill’s Poems , ii. 15.

[361] In the Life of Pope Johnson writes:—‘Paul Whitehead, a small poet, was summoned before the Lords for a poem called Manners , together with Dodsley his publisher. Whitehead, who hung loose upon society, sculked and escaped; but Dodsley’s shop and family made his appearance necessary.’ Johnson’s Works , viii. 297. Manners was published in 1739. Dodsley was kept in custody for a week. Gent. Mag . ix. 104. ‘The whole process was supposed to be intended rather to intimidate Pope [who in his Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-Eight had given offence] than to punish Whitehead, and it answered that purpose.’ CHALMERS, quoted in Parl. Hist . x. 1325

[362] Sir John Hawkins, p. 86, tells us:—‘The event is antedated , in the poem of London ; but in every particular, except the difference of a year, what is there said of the departure of Thales, must be understood of Savage, and looked upon as true history .’ This conjecture is, I believe, entirely groundless. I have been assured, that Johnson said he was not so much as acquainted with Savage when he wrote his London . If the departure mentioned in it was the departure of Savage, the event was not antedated but foreseen ; for London was published in May, 1738, and Savage did not set out for Wales till July, 1739. However well Johnson could defend the credibility of second sight [see post , Feb. 1766], he did not pretend that he himself was possessed of that faculty. BOSWELL. I am not sure that Hawkins is altogether wrong in his account. Boswell does not state of his own knowledge that Johnson was not acquainted with Savage when he wrote London . The death of Queen Caroline in Nov. 1737 deprived Savage of her yearly bounty, and ‘abandoned him again to fortune’ (Johnson’s Works , viii. 166). The elegy on her that he composed on her birthday (March 1) brought him no reward. He was ‘for some time in suspense,’ but nothing was done. ‘He was in a short time reduced to the lowest degree of distress, and often wanted both lodging and food’ ( Ib . p. 169). His friends formed a scheme that ‘he should retire into Wales.’ ‘While this scheme was ripening’ he lodged ‘in the liberties of the Fleet, that he might be secure from his creditors’ ( Ib . p. 170). After many delays a subscription was at length raised to provide him with a small pension, and he left London in July 1739 ( Ib . p 173). London , as I have shewn, was written before April 6, 1738. That it was written with great rapidity we might infer from the fact that a hundred lines of The Vanity of Human Wishes were written in a day. At this rate London might have been the work of three days. That it was written in a very short time seems to be shown by a passage in the first of these letters to Cave. Johnson says:—‘When I took the liberty of writing to you a few days ago, I did not expect a repetition of the same pleasure so soon; … but having the enclosed poem, &c.’ It is probable that in these few days the poem was written. If we can assume that Savage’s elegy was sent to the Court not later than March 1—it may have been sent earlier—and that Johnson’s poem was written in the last ten days of March, we have three weeks for the intervening events. They are certainly not more than sufficient, if indeed they are sufficient. The coincidence is certainly very striking between Thales’s retirement to ‘Cambria’s solitary shore’ and Savage’s retirement to Wales. There are besides lines in the poem—additions to Juvenal and not translations—which curiously correspond with what Johnson wrote of Savage in his Life . Thus he says that Savage ‘imagined that he should be transported to scenes of flowery felicity; … he could not bear … to lose the opportunity of listening, without intermission, to the melody of the nightingale, which he believed was to be heard from every bramble, and which he did not fail to mention as a very important part of the happiness of a country life’ ( Ib . p. 170). In like manner Thales prays to find:—