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

[1055] Prayers and Meditations , p. 42. BOSWELL. The following is his entry on this day:—

‘1760, Sept. 18. Resolved D[eo]j[uvante]’

To combat notions of obligation.

To apply to study.

To reclaim imagination.

To consult the resolves on Tetty’s coffin.

To rise early.

To study religion.

To go to church.

To drink less strong liquors.

To keep a journal.

To oppose laziness, by doing what is to be done tomorrow.

Rise as early as I can.

Send for books for Hist. of War.

Put books in order.

Scheme of life.’

[1056] See post , Oct. 19, 1769, and May 15, 1783, for Johnson’s measure of emotion, by eating.

[1057] Mr. Croker points out that Murphy’s Epistle was an imitation of Boileau’s Epître à Molière .

[1058] The paper mentioned in the text is No. 38 of the second series of the Grays Inn Journal , published on June 15, 1754; which is a translation from the French version of Johnson’s Rambler , No. 190. MALONE. Mrs. Piozzi relates how Murphy, used to tell before Johnson of the first time they met. He found our friend all covered with soot, like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the Alchymist , making aether. ‘Come, come,’ says Dr. Johnson, ‘dear Murphy, the story is black enough now; and it was a very happy day for me that brought you first to my house, and a very happy mistake about the Ramblers.’ Piozzi’s Anec . p. 235. Murphy quotes her account, Murphy’s Johnson , p. 79. See also post , 1770, where Dr. Maxwell records in his Collectanea how Johnson ‘very much loved Arthur Murphy.’ Miss Burney thus describes him:—‘He is tall and well-made, has a very gentlemanlike appearance, and a quietness of manner upon his first address that to me is very pleasing. His face looks sensible, and his deportment is perfectly easy and polite.’ A few days later she records:—‘Mr. Murphy was the life of the party; he was in good spirits, and extremely entertaining; he told a million of stories admirably well.’ Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary , i. 195, 210. Rogers, who knew Murphy well, says that ‘towards the close of his life, till he received a pension of £200 from the King, he was in great pecuniary difficulties. He had eaten himself out of every tavern from the other side of Temple-Bar to the west end of the town.’ He owed Rogers a large sum of money, which he never repaid. ‘He assigned over to me the whole of his works; and I soon found that he had already disposed of them to a bookseller. One thing,’ Rogers continues, ‘ought to be remembered to his honour; an actress with whom he had lived bequeathed to him all her property, but he gave up every farthing of it to her relations.’ He was pensioned in 1803, and he died in 1805. Rogers’s Table-Talk , p. 106.

[1059] Topham Beauclerk, Esq. BOSWELL.

[1060] Essays with that title, written about this time by Mr. Langton, but not published. BOSWELL.

[1061] Thomas Sheridan, born 1721, died 1788. He was the son of Swift’s friend, and the father of R. B. Sheridan (who was born in 1751), and the great-great-grandfather of the present Earl of Dufferin.

[1062] Sheridan was acting in Garrick’s Company, generally on the nights on which Garrick did not appear. Davies’s Garrick , i. 299. Johnson criticises his reading, post , April 18, 1783.

[1063] Mrs. Sheridan was authour of Memoirs of Miss Sydney Biddulph , a novel of great merit, and of some other pieces.—See her character, post , beginning of 1763. BOSWELL.

[1064] Prayers and Meditations , p. 44. BOSWELL. ‘1761. Easter Eve. Since the communion of last Easter I have led a life so dissipated and useless, and my terrours and perplexities have so much increased, that I am under great depression and discouragement.’

[1065] See post , April 6, 1775.

[1066] I have had inquiry made in Ireland as to this story, but do not find it recollected there. I give it on the authority of Dr. Johnson, to which may be added that of the biographical Dictionary , and Biographia Dramatica ; in both of which it has stood many years. Mr. Malone observes, that the truth probably is, not that an edition was published with Rolt’s name in the title-page, but, that the poem being then anonymous, Rolt acquiesced in its being attributed to him in conversation. BOSWELL.

[1067] I have both the books. Innes was the clergyman who brought Psalmanazar to England, and was an accomplice in his extraordinary fiction. BOSWELL. It was in 1728 that Innes, who was a Doctor of Divinity and Preacher-Assistant at St. Margaret’s Westminster, published this book. In his impudent Dedication to Lord Chancellor King he says that ‘were matters once brought to the melancholy pass that mankind should become proselytes to such impious delusions’ as Mandeville taught, ‘punishments must be annexed to virtue and rewards to vice.’ It was not till 1730 that Dr. Campbell ‘laid open this imposture.’ Preface, p. xxxi. Though he was Professor of Ecclesiastical History in St. Andrews, yet he had not, it should seem, heard of the fraud till then: so remote was Scotland from London in those days. It was not till 1733 that he published his own edition. For Psalmanazar, see post , April 18, 1778.

[1068] ‘Died, the Rev. Mr. Eccles, at Bath. In attempting to save a boy, whom he saw sinking in the Avon, he, together with the youth, were both drowned.’ Gent. Mag . Aug. 15, 1777. And in the magazine for the next month are some verses on this event, with an epitaph, of which the first line is,

‘Beneath this stone the “ Man of Feeling ” lies.’

[1069] ‘Harry Mackenzie,’ wrote Scott in 1814, ‘never put his name in a title page till the last edition of his works.’ Lockhart’s Scott , iv. 178. He wrote also The Man of the World , which Johnson ‘looked at, but thought there was nothing in it.’ Boswell’s Hebrides , Oct. 2, 1773. Scott, however, called it ‘a very pathetic tale.’ Croker’s _Boswell, p. 359. Burns, writing of his twenty-third year, says: ‘ Tristram Shandy and the Man of Feeling were my bosom favourites.’ Currie’s Life of Burns , ed.1846. p. 21.

[1070] From the Prologue to Dryden’s adaptation of The Tempest .

[1071] The originals of Dr. Johnson’s three letters to Mr. baretti, which are among the very best he ever wrote, were communicated to the elegant monthly miscellany, The European Magazine , in which they first appeared. BOSWELL.

[1072] Baretti left London for Lisbon on Aug. 14, 1760. He went through Portugal, Spain, and France to Antibes, whence he went by sea to Genoa, where he arrived on Nov. 18. In 1770 he published a lively account of his travels under the title of A Journey from London to Genoa .

[1073] Malone says of Baretti that ‘he was certainly a man of extraordinary talents, and perhaps no one ever made himself so completely master of a foreign language as he did of English.’ Prior’s Malone , p. 392. Mrs. Piozzi gives the following ‘instance of his skill in our low street language. Walking in a field near Chelsea he met a fellow, who, suspecting him from dress and manner to be a foreigner, said sneeringly, “Come, Sir, will you show me the way to France?” “No, Sir,” says Baretti instantly, “but I will show you the way to Tyburn.”’ He travelled with her in France. ‘Oh how he would court the maids at the inns abroad, abuse the men perhaps, and that with a facility not to be exceeded, as they all confessed, by any of the natives. But so he could in Spain, I find.’ Hayward’s Piozzi , ii. 347.