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

[1092] Though Johnson wrote this same day to Lord Bute to thank him for his pension, he makes no mention to Baretti of this accession to his fortune.

[1093] See ante , p. 245. Mrs. Porter, the actress, lived some time with Mrs. Cotterel and her eldest daughter. CROKER.

[1094] Miss Charlotte Cotterel, married to Dean Lewis. See post , Dec. 21, 1762.

[1095] Reynolds’s note-book shows that this year he had close on 150 sitters. Taylor’s Reynolds , i. 218.

[1096] He married a woman of the town, who had persuaded him (notwithstanding their place of congress was a small coalshed in Fetter Lane) that she was nearly related to a man of fortune, but was injuriously kept by him out of large possessions. She regarded him as a physician already in considerable practice. He had not been married four months, before a writ was taken out against him for debts incurred by his wife. He was secreted; and his friend then procured him a protection from a foreign minister. In a short time afterwards she ran away from him, and was tried (providentially in his opinion) for picking pockets at the Old Bailey. Her husband was with difficulty prevented from attending the Court, in the hope she would be hanged. She pleaded her own cause and was acquitted. A separation between them took place.’ Gent. Mag . lv. 101.

[1097] Richardson had died more than a year earlier,—on July 4, 1761. That Johnson should think it needful at the date of his letter to inform Baretti of the death of so famous a writer shows how slight was the communication between London and Milan. Nay, he repeats the news in his letter of Dec. 21, 1762.

[1098] On Dec. 8, 1765, he wrote to Hector:—‘A few years ago I just saluted Birmingham, but had no time to see any friend, for I came in after midnight with a friend, and went away in the morning.’ Notes and Queries , 6th S. iii. 321. He passed through Birmingham, I conjecture, on his visit to Lichfield.

[1099] Writing to Mrs. Thrale from Lichfield on July 20, 1767, he says:—‘Miss Lucy [Porter, his step-daughter, not his daughter-in-law, as he calls her above] is more kind and civil than I expected, and has raised my esteem by many excellencies very noble and resplendent, though a little discoloured by hoary virginity. Everything else recalls to my remembrance years, in which I proposed what I am afraid I have not done, and promised myself pleasure which I have not found.’ Piozzi Letters , i. 4.

[1100] In his Journey into Wales (Aug. 24, 1774), he describes how Mrs. Thrale visited one of the scenes of her youth. ‘She remembered the rooms, and wandered over them with recollection of her childhood. This species of pleasure is always melancholy. The walk was cut down and the pond was dry. Nothing was better.’

[1101] This is a very just account of the relief which London affords to melancholy minds. BOSWELL.

[1102] To Devonshire.

[1103] See ante , p. 322.

[1104] Dr. T. Campbell ( Diary of a visit to England , p. 32) recorded on March 16, 1775, that ‘Baretti said that now he could not live out of London. He had returned a few years ago to his own country, but he could not enjoy it; and he was obliged to return to London to those connections he had been making for near thirty years past.’ Baretti had come to England in 1750 ( ante , p. 302), so that thirty years is an exaggeration.

[1105] How great a sum this must have been in Johnson’s eyes is shown by a passage in his Life of Savage ( Works , viii. 125). Savage, he says, was received into Lord Tyrconnel’s family and allowed a pension of £200 a year. ‘His presence,’ Johnson writes, ‘was sufficient to make any place of publick entertainment popular; and his approbation and example constituted the fashion. So powerful is genius when it is invested with the glitter of affluence!’ In the last summer of his life, speaking of the chance of his pension being doubled, he said that with six hundred a year ‘a man would have the consciousness that he should pass the remainder of his life in splendour , how long soever it might be.’ Post , June 30, 1784. David Hume writing in 1751, says:—‘I have £50 a year, a £100 worth of books, great store of linens and fine clothes, and near £100 in my pocket; along with order, frugality, a strong spirit of independency, good health, a contented humour, and an unabating love of study. In these circumstances I must esteem myself one of the happy and fortunate.’ J. H. Burton’s Hume , i. 342. Goldsmith, in his Present State of Polite Learning (chap, vii), makes the following observation on pensions granted in France to authors:—‘The French nobility have certainly a most pleasing way of satisfying the vanity of an author without indulging his avarice. A man of literary merit is sure of being caressed by the great, though seldom enriched. His pension from the crown just supplies half a competence, and the sale of his labours makes some small addition to his circumstances; thus the author leads a life of splendid poverty, and seldom becomes wealthy or indolent enough to discontinue an exertion of those abilities by which he rose.’ Whether Johnson’s pension led to his writing less than he would otherwise have done may be questioned. It is true that in the next seventeen years he did little more than finish his edition of Shakespeare , and write his Journey to the Western Islands and two or three political pamphlets. But since he wrote the last number of The Idler in the spring of 1760 he had done very little. His mind, which, to use Murphy’s words ( Life , p. 80), had been ‘strained and overlaboured by constant exertion,’ had not recovered its tone. It is likely, that without the pension he would not have lived to write the second greatest of his works—the Lives of the Poets .

[1106] Mr. Forster ( Life of Goldsmith , i. 281) says:—‘Bute’s pensions to his Scottish crew showing meaner than ever in Churchill’s daring verse, it occurred to the shrewd and wary Wedderburne to advise, for a set off, that Samuel Johnson should be pensioned.’ The Prophecy of Famine in which Churchill’s attack was made on the pensioned Scots was published in Jan. 1763, nearly half a year after Johnson’s pension was conferred.

[1107] For his Falkland’s Islands ‘materials were furnished to him by the ministry’ ( post , 1771). ‘ The Patriot was called for,’ he writes, ‘by my political friends’ ( post , Nov. 26, 1774). ‘That Taxation no Tyranny was written at the desire of those who were then in power, I have no doubt,’ writes Boswell ( post , under March 21, 1775). ‘Johnson complained to a friend that, his pension having been given to him as a literary character, he had been applied to by administration to write political pamphlets’ ( Ib .). Are these statements inconsistent with what Lord Loughborough said, and with Boswell’s assertion ( Ib .) that ‘Johnson neither asked nor received from government any reward whatsoever for his political labours?’ I think not. I think that, had Johnson unpensioned been asked by the Ministry to write these pamphlets, he would have written them. He would have been pleased by the compliment, and for pay would have trusted to the sale. Speaking of the first two of these pamphlets—the third had not yet appeared—he said, ‘Except what I had from the booksellers, I did not get a farthing by them’ ( post , March 21, 1772). They had not cost him much labour. The False Alarm was written between eight o’clock of one night and twelve o’clock of the next. It went through three editions in less than two months ( post , 1770). The Patriot was written on a Saturday ( post , Nov. 26, 1774). At all events Johnson had received his pension for more than seven years before he did any work for the ministry. In Croft’s Life of Young , which Johnson adopted ( Works , viii. 422), the following passage was perhaps intended to be a defence of Johnson as a writer for the Ministry:—‘Yet who shall say with certainty that Young was a pensioner? In all modern periods of this country, have not the writers on one side been regularly called hirelings, and on the other patriots?’