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

[735] It was to the Round-house that Captain Booth was first taken in Fielding’s Amelia , Book i, chap. 2.

[736]

‘Blends, in exception to all general rules,

Your taste of follies with our scorn of fools.’

Pope, Moral Essays , ii. 275.

[737] In the college which The Club was to set up at St. Andrew’s, Beauclerk was to have the chair of natural philosophy. Boswell’s Hebrides , Aug. 25, 1773. Goldsmith, writing to Langton in 1771, says: ‘Mr. Beauclerk is now going directly forward to become a second Boyle; deep in chymistry and physics.’ Forster’s Goldsmith , ii. 283. Boswell described to Temple, in 1775, Beauclerk’s villa at Muswell Hill, with its ‘observatory, laboratory for chymical experiments.’ Boswell’s Letters , p. 194.

[738] ‘I’ll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do.’ 1 Henry IV. Act v. sc. 4.

[739] ‘Bishop. A cant word for a mixture of wine, oranges, and sugar.’ Johnson’s Dictionary .

[740] Mr. Langton has recollected, or Dr. Johnson repeated, the passage wrong. The lines are in Lord Lansdowne’s Drinking Song to Sleep, and run thus:—

‘Short, very short be then thy reign,

For I’m in haste to laugh and drink again.’ BOSWELL.

Lord Lansdowne was the Granville of Pope’s couplet—

‘But why then publish? Granville the polite,

And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write.’

Prologue to the Satires, 1.135.

[741] Boswell in Hebrides (Aug. 18, 1773) says that Johnson, on starting from Edinburgh, left behind in an open drawer in Boswell’s house ‘one volume of a pretty full and curious Diary of his life, of which I have a few fragments.’ He also states ( post , under Dec 9, 1784):—‘I owned to him, that having accidentally seen them [two quarto volumes of his Life ] I had read a great deal in them.’ It would seem that he had also transcribed a portion.

[742] This is inconsistent with what immediately follows, for No. 39 on Sleep was published on March 20.

[743] Hawkesworth in the last number of The Adventurer says that he had help at first from A.; ‘but this resource soon failing, I was obliged to carry on the publication alone, except some casual supplies, till I obtained from the gentlemen who have distinguished their papers by T and Z, such assistance as I most wished.’ In a note he says that the papers signed Z are by the Rev. Mr. Warton. The papers signed A are written in a light style. In Southey’s Cowper , i. 47, it is said that Bonnell Thornton wrote them.

[744] Boswell had read the passage carelessly. Statius is mentioned, but the writer goes on to quote Cowley , whose Latin lines C. B. has translated. Johnson’s Works , iv. 10.

[745] Malone says that ‘Johnson was fond of him, but latterly owned that Hawkesworth—who had set out a modest, humble man—was one of the many whom success in the world had spoiled. He was latterly, as Sir Joshua Reynolds told me, an affected insincere man, and a great coscomb in his dress. He had no literature whatever.’ Prior’s Malone , p. 441. See post , April 11 and May 7, 1773, and Boswell’s Hebrides , Oct. 3.

[746] ‘Johnson’s statement to Warton is definite and is borne out by internal evidence, if internal evidence can be needful when he had once made a definite statement. The papers signed Misargyrus , the first of which appeared on March 3, are all below his style. They were not, I feel sure, written by him, and are improperly given in the Oxford edition of his works. I do not find in them even any traces of his hand. The paper on Sleep, No. 39, is I am almost sure, partly his, but I believe it is not wholly. In the frequency of quotations in the first part of it I see another, and probably a younger author. The passage on the ‘low drudgery of digesting dictionaries’ is almost certainly his. Dr. Bathurst, perhaps, wrote the Essay, and Johnson corrected it. Whether it was Johnson’s or not, it was published after the letter to Dr. Warton was written.

[747] See post , April 25, 1778, for an instance where Johnson’s silence did not imply assent.

[748] ‘One evening at the Club Johnson proposed to us the celebrating the birth of Mrs. Lennox’s first literary child, as he called her book, [ The Life of Harriet Stuart , a novel, published Dec. 1750] by a whole night spent in festivity. Our supper was elegant, and Johnson had directed that a magnificent hot apple-pie should make a part of it, and this he would have stuck with bay-leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox was an authoress, and had written verses; and further, he had prepared for her a crown of laurel, with which, but not till he had invoked the Muses by some ceremonies of his own invention, he encircled her brows. About five Johnson’s face shone with meridian splendour, though his drink had been only lemonade.’ Hawkins’s Johnson , p. 286. See post , 1780, in Mr. Langton’s ‘Collection,’ and May 15, 1784.

[749] In a document in the possession of one of Cave’s collateral descendants which I have seen dated May 3, 1754, and headed, ‘Present state of the late Mr. Edward Cave’s effects,’ I found entered ‘ Magazine , £3,000. Daily Advertiser , £900.’ The total value of the effects was £8,708.

[750] Johnson records of his friend that ‘one of the last acts of reason which he exerted was fondly to press the hand that is now writing this little narrative.’ Works , vi. 433.

[751] See Hawkins’s Johnson , p. 189.

[752] Lord Chesterfield writing to his son in 1751 ( Letters , iii. 136) said:—‘People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind, as surgeons are to their bodily pains; they see and hear of them all day long, and even of so many simulated ones, that they do not know which has are real, and which are not. Other sentiments are therefore to be applied to than those of mere justice and humanity; their favour must be captivated by the suaviter in modo ; their love of ease disturbed by unwearied importunity; or their fears wrought upon by a decent intimation of implacable, cool resentment: this is the true fortiter in re ! He was himself to experience an instance of the true fortiter in re .

[753] If Lord Chesterfield had read the last number of The Rambler (published in March, 1752) he could scarcely have flattered himself with these expectations. Johnson, after saying that he would not endeavour to overbear the censures of criticism by the influence of a patron, added:—‘The supplications of an author never yet reprieved him a moment from oblivion; and, though greatness sometimes sheltered guilt, it can afford no protection to ignorance or dulness. Having hitherto attempted only the propagation of truth, I will not at last violate it by the confession of terrors which I do not feel; having laboured to maintain the dignity of virtue, I will not now degrade it by the meanness of dedication.’

[754] On Nov. 28 and Dec. 5, 1754. The World , by Adam Fitz-Adam, Jan. 1753 to Dec. 1765. The editor was Edward Moore. Among the contributors were the Earls of Chesterfield and Corke, Horace Walpole, R. O. Cambridge, and Soame Jenyns. See post , July 1, 1763.

[755] With these papers as a whole Johnson would have been highly offended. The anonymous writer hopes that his readers will not suspect him ‘of being a hired and interested puff of this work.’ ‘I most solemnly protest,’ he goes on to say, ‘that neither Mr. Johnson, nor any booksellers have ever offered me the usual compliment of a pair of gloves or a bottle of wine.’ It is a pretty piece of irony for a wealthy nobleman solemnly to protest that he has not been bribed by a poor author, whom seven years before he had repulsed from his door. But Chesterfield did worse than this. By way of recommending a work of so much learning and so much labour he tells a foolish story of an assignation that had failed ‘between a fine gentleman and a fine lady.’ The letter that had passed between them had been badly spelt, and they had gone to different houses. ‘Such examples,’ he wrote, ‘really make one tremble; and will, I am convinced, determine my fair fellow-subjects and their adherents to adopt and scrupulously conform to Mr. Johnson’s rules of true orthography.’ Johnson, in the last year of his life, at a time of great weakness and depression, defended the roughness of his manner. ‘I have done more good as I am. Obscenity and impiety have always been repressed in my company’ ( post , June 11, 1784).