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

[787] Lord Shelburne said that ‘Bolingbroke was both a political and personal coward.’ Fitzmaurice’s Shelburne , i. 29.

[788] It was in the summer of this year that Murphy became acquainted with Johnson. (See post, 1760.) ‘The first striking sentence that he heard from him was in a few days after the publication of Lord Bolingbroke’s posthumous works. Mr. Garrick asked him, “if he had seen them.” “Yes, I have seen them.” “What do you think of them?” “Think of them!” He made a long pause, and then replied: “Think of them! a scoundrel and a coward! A scoundrel who spent his life in charging a gun against Christianity; and a coward, who was afraid of hearing the report of his own gun; but left half-a-crown to a hungry Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death!” His mind, at this time strained and over laboured by constant exertion, called for an interval of repose and indolence. But indolence was the time of danger; it was then that his spirits, not employed abroad, turned with inward hostility against himself.’ Murphy’s Johnson , p. 79, and Piozzi’s Anec ., p. 235. Adam Smith, perhaps, had this saying of Johnson’s in mind, when in 1776 he refused the request of the dying Hume to edit after his death his Dialogues on Natural Religion . Hume wrote back:—‘I think your scruples groundless. Was Mallet anywise hurt by his publication of Lord Bolingbroke? He received an office afterwards from the present King and Lord Bute, the most prudish man in the world.’ Smith did not yield. J. H. Burton’s Hume , ii. 491.

[789] According to Horace Walpole ( Letters , ii. 374), Pelham died of a surfeit. As Johnson says ( Works , viii. 310):—‘The death of great men is not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives. The death of Pope was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampreys.’ Fielding in The Voyage to Lisbon ( Works , x. 201) records:—‘I was at the worst on that memorable day when the public lost Mr. Pelham. From that day I began slowly, as it were, to draw my feet out of the grave.’ ‘“I shall now have no more peace,” the King said with a sigh; being told of his Minister’s death.’ Walpole’s George II , i. 378.

[790] ‘Thomas Warton, the younger brother of Dr. Warton, was a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He was Poetry Professor from 1758 to 1768. Mant’s Warton , i. xliv. In 1785 he was made Poet Laureate. Ib . lxxxiii. Mr. Mant, telling of an estrangement between Johnson and the Wartons, says that he had heard ‘on unquestionable authority that Johnson had lamented, with tears in his eyes, that the Wartons had not called on him for the last four years; and that he has been known to declare that Tom Warton was the only man of genius whom he knew without a heart.’ Ib . xxxix.

[791] ‘Observations on Spenser’s Fairy Queen, the first edition of which was now just published.’ WARTON.

[792] ‘Hughes published an edition of Spenser.’ WARTON. See Johnson’s Works , vii.476.

[793] ‘His Dictionary.’ WARTON.

[794] ‘He came to Oxford within a fortnight, and stayed about five weeks. He lodged at a house called Kettel hall, near Trinity College. But during this visit at Oxford, he collected nothing in the libraries for his Dictionary.’ WARTON.

[795] Pitt this year described, in the House of Commons, a visit that he had paid to Oxford the summer before. He and his friends ‘were at the window of the Angel Inn; a lady was desired to sing God save great George our King . The chorus was re-echoed by a set of young lads drinking at a college over the way [Queen’s], but with additions of rank treason.’ Walpole’s George II , i. 413.

[796] A Fellow of Pembroke College, of Johnson’s time, described the college servants as in ‘the state of servitude the most miserable that can be conceived amongst so many masters.’ He says that ‘the kicks and cuffs and bruises they submit to entitle them, when those who were displeased relent,’ to the compensation that is afforded by draughts of ale. ‘There is not a college servant, but if he have learnt to suffer, and to be officious, and be inclined to tipple, may forget his cares in a gallon or two of ale every day of his life.’ Dr. Johnson:—His Friends, &c ., p. 45.

[797] It was against the Butler that Johnson, in his college days, had written an epigram:—

‘Quid mirum Maro quod digne

canit arma virumque,

Quid quod putidulum nostra

Camoena sonat?

Limosum nobis Promus dat callidus

haustum;

Virgilio vires uva Falerna dedit.

Carmina vis nostri scribant

meliora Poetae?

Ingenium jubeas purior haustus

alat.’

[798] Pope, Eloisa to Abelard , 1. 38.

[799] Johnson or Warton misquoted the line. It stands:—‘Mittit aromaticas vallis Saronica nubes.’ Husbands’s Miscellany , p. 112.

[800] De Quincey ( Works , xiii. 162), after saying that Johnson did not understand Latin ‘with the elaborate and circumstantial accuracy required for the editing critically of a Latin classic,’ continues:—‘But if he had less than that, he also had more: he possessed that language in a way that no extent of mere critical knowledge could confer. He wrote it genially, not as one translating into it painfully from English, but as one using it for his original organ of thinking. And in Latin verse he expressed himself at times with the energy and freedom of a Roman.’

[801] Mr. Jorden. See ante , p. 59.

[802] Boswell ( Hebrides , Aug. 19, 1773) says that Johnson looked at the ruins at St. Andrew’s ‘with a strong indignation. I happened to ask where John Knox was buried. Dr. Johnson burst out, “I hope in the highway, I have been looking at his reformations.”’

[803] In Reasmus Philipps’s Diary it is recorded that in Pembroke College early in every November ‘was kept a great Gaudy [feast], when the Master dined in public, and the juniors (by an ancient custom they were obliged to observe) went round the fire in the hall.’ Notes & Queries , 2nd S. x. 443.

[804] Communicated by the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, who had the original. BOSWELL. In the imaginary college which was to be opened by The Club at St. Andrew’s, Chambers was to be the professor of the law of England. See Boswell’s Hebrides , Aug. 25, 1773; also post , July 5, 1773 and March 30, 1774.

[805] I presume she was a relation of Mr. Zachariah Williams, who died in his eighty-third year, July 12, 1755. When Dr. Johnson was with me at Oxford, in 1755, he gave to the Bodleian Library a thin quarto of twenty-one pages, a work in Italian, with an English translation on the opposite page. The English titlepage is this: ‘An Account of an Attempt to ascertain the Longitude at Sea, by an exact Variation of the Magnetical Needle, &c. By Zachariah Williams. London, printed for Dodsley, 1755.’ The English translation, from the strongest internal marks, is unquestionably the work of Johnson. In a blank leaf, Johnson has written the age, and time of death, of the authour Z. Williams, as I have said above. On another blank leaf, is pasted a paragraph from a newspaper, of the death and character of Williams, which is plainly written by Johnson. He was very anxious about placing this book in the Bodleian: and, for fear of any omission or mistake, he entered, in the great Catalogue, the titlepage of it with his own hand.’ WARTON.—BOSWELL.

In this statement there is a slight mistake. The English account, which was written by Johnson, was the original the Italian was a translation , done by Baretti. See post , end of 1755. MALONE. Johnson has twice entered in his own hand that ‘Zachariah Williams, died July 12, 1755, in his eighty-third year,’ and also on the titlepage that he was 82.