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

Howe’er unwillingly it quits its place,

Nay, though at court, perhaps, it may find grace:

Such they’ll degrade; and sometimes, in its stead,

In downright charity revive the dead;

Mark where a bold expressive phrase appears,

Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years;

Command old words that long have slept to wake,

Words that wise Bacon or brave Rawleigh spake;

Or bid the new be English, ages hence,

(For use will father what’s begot by sense;)

Pour the full tide of eloquence along,

Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong,

Rich with the treasures of each foreign tongue.’

Pope, Imitations of Horace , ii. 2. 157

[655] ‘Horat. De Arte Poetica . [1. 48.] BOSWELL.

[656] See Boswell’s Hebrides , Aug. 29, 1773, where Boswell says that up that date he had twice heard Johnson coin words, peregrinity and depeditation .

[657] ‘The words which our authors have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion or lust of innovation, I have registered as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives…. Our language for almost a century has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it, by making our ancient volumes the groundwork of style…. From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance.’ Johnson’s Works , v. pp. 31, 39. See post . May 12, 1778.

[658] If Johnson sometimes indulged his Brownism (see post , beginning of 1756), yet he saw much to censure in Browne’s style. ‘His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must however be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction…. His innovations are sometimes pleasing, and his temerities happy.’ Johnson’s Works , vi. 500. ‘It is remarkable that the pomp of diction, which has been objected to Johnson, was first assumed in the Rambler . His Dictionary was going on at the same time, and in the course of that work, as he grew familiar with technical and scholastic words, he thought that the bulk of his readers were equally learned; or at least would admire the splendour and dignity of the style.’ Murphy’s Johnson , p. 156.

‘The observation of his having imitated Sir Thomas Brown has been made by many people; and lately it has been insisted on, and illustrated by a variety of quotations from Brown, in one of the popular Essays written by the Reverend Mr. Knox [the Essay is No. xxii. of Winter Evenings , Knox’s Works , ii 397], master of Tumbridge school, whom I have set down in my list [ post , under Dec. 6, 1784] of those who have sometimes not unsuccessfully imitated Dr. Johnson’s style. BOSWELL.

[659] The following observation in Mr. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides [p. 9] may sufficiently account for that Gentleman’s being ‘now scarcely esteem’d a Scot’ by many of his countrymen:—If he [Dr. Johnson] was particularly prejudiced against the Scots, it was because they were more in his way; because he thought their success in England rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit; and because he could not but see in them that nationality which, I believe, no liberal-minded Scotchman will deny.’ Mr. Boswell, indeed, is so free from national prejudices, that he might with equal propriety have been described as—

‘Scarce by South Britons now esteem’d a Scot.’ COURTENAY. BOSWELL.

[660] Malone says that ‘Baretti used sometimes to walk with Johnson through the streets at night, and occasionally entered into conversation with the unfortunate women who frequent them, for the sake of hearing their stories. It was from a history of one of these, which a girl told under a tree in the King’s Bench Walk in the Temple to Baretti and Johnson, that he formed the story of Misella in the Rambler [Nos. 170 and 171].’ Prior’s Malone , p. 161. ‘Of one [of these women] who was very handsome he asked, for what she thought God had given her so much beauty. She answered:—“To please gentlemen.”’ Hawkins’s Johnson , p. 321. See also post , under Dec. 2, 1784.

[661] Hawkins ( Life , p. 270) had said that ‘the characteristics of Addison’s style are feebleness and inanity.’ He was thus happily ridiculed by Person:—‘Soon after the publication of Sir John’s book, a parcel of Eton boys, not having the fear of God before their eyes, etc., instead of playing truant, robbing orchards, annoying poultry, or performing any other part of their school exercise, fell foul in print (see the Microcosm , No. 36) upon his Worship’s censure of Addison’s middling style…. But what can you expect, as Lord Kames justly observes, from a school where boys are taught to rob on the highway?’ Person, Tracts , p. 339.

[662] Works , vii. 473.

[663] When Johnson shewed me a proof-sheet of the character of Addison, in which he so highly extols his style, I could not help observing, that it had not been his own model, as no two styles could differ more from each other.—‘Sir, Addison had his style, and I have mine.’—When I ventured to ask him, whether the difference did not consist in this, that Addison’s style was full of idioms, colloquial phrases, and proverbs; and his own more strictly grammatical, and free from such phraseology and modes of speech as can never be literally translated or understood by foreigners; he allowed the discrimination to be just.—Let any one who doubts it, try to translate one of Addison’s Spectators into Latin, French, or Italian; and though so easy, familiar, and elegant, to an Englishman, as to give the intellect no trouble; yet he would find the transfusion into another language extremely difficult, if not impossible. But a Rambler , Adventurer , or Idler , of Johnson, would fall into any classical or European language, as easily as if it had been originally conceived in it. BURNEY. Mrs. Piozzi ( Anec . p. 125) recounts how Johnson recommended Addison’s works as a model for imitation to Mr. Woodhouse, a poetical shoemaker. ‘“Give nights and days, Sir, (said he) to the study of Addison, if you mean either to be a good writer, or, what is more worth, an honest man.” When I saw something like the same expression in his criticism on that author, I put him in mind of his past injunctions to the young poet, to which he replied, “That he wished the shoemaker might have remembered them as well.”’ Yet he says in his Life of Pope ( Works , viii. 284), ‘He that has once studiously formed a style rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.’

[664] I shall probably, in another work, maintain the merit of Addison’s poetry, which has been very unjustly depreciated. BOSWELL. He proposed also to publish an edition of Johnson’s poems ( ante , p. 16), an account of his own travels ( post , April 17, 1778), a collection, with notes, of old tenures and charters of Scotland ( post , Oct. 27, 1779), and a History of James IV. of Scotland, ‘the patron,’ as he said, ‘of my family’ (Boswell’s Hebrides , Aug. 23, 1773).

[665] Lewis thus happily translates the lines in Martial ,—