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

[1140] See post , March 28, 1776.

[1141] Horace Walpole describes Lord Bute as ‘a man that had passed his life in solitude, and was too haughty to admit to his familiarity but half a dozen silly authors and flatterers. Sir Henry Erskine, a military poet, Home, a tragedy-writing parson,’ &c. Mem. of the Reign of George III , i. 37.

[1142] See post , March 28, 1776.

[1143] ‘Native wood- notes wild.’ Milton’s L’Allegro , l. 134

[1144]

‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas

Corpora. Di coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)

Adspirate meis.’

‘Of bodies changed to various forms I sing:—

Ye Gods from whence these miracles did spring

Inspired, &c.’—DRYDEN, Ov. Met . i.i.

See post under March 30, 1783, for Lord Loughborough.

[1145] See post , May 17, 1783, and June 24, 1784. Sheridan was not of a forgiving nature. For some years he would not speak to his famous son: yet he went with his daughters to the theatre to see one of his pieces performed. ‘The son took up his station by one of the side scenes, opposite to the box where they sat, and there continued, unobserved, to look at them during the greater part of the night. On his return home he burst into tears, and owned how deeply it had gone to his heart, “to think that there sat his father and his sisters before him, and yet that he alone was not permitted to go near them.”’ Moore’s Sheridan , i. 167.

[1146] As Johnson himself said:—‘Men hate more steadily than they love; and if I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.’ Post , Sept. 15, 1777.

[1147] P. 447. BOSWELL. ‘There is another writer, at present of gigantic fame in these days of little men, who has pretended to scratch out a life of Swift, but so miserably executed as only to reflect back on himself that disgrace which he meant to throw upon the character of the Dean.’ The Life of Doctor Swift , Swift’s Works , ed. 1803, ii. 200. There is a passage in the Lives of the Poets ( Works , viii. 43) in which Johnson might be supposed playfully to have anticipated this attack. He is giving an account of Blackmore’s imaginary Literary Club of Lay Monks , of which the hero was ‘one Mr. Johnson.’ ‘The rest of the Lay Monks ,’ he writes, ‘seem to be but feeble mortals, in comparison with the gigantick Johnson.’ See also post , Oct. 16, 1769. Horace Walpole ( Letters , v. 458) spoke no less scornfully than Sheridan of Johnson and his contemporaries. On April 27, 1773, after saying that he should like to be intimate with Anstey (the author of the New Bath Guide ), or with the author of the Heroic Epistle , he continues:—‘I have no thirst to know the rest of my contemporaries, from the absurd bombast of Dr. Johnson down to the silly Dr. Goldsmith; though the latter changeling has had bright gleams of parts, and the former had sense, till he changed it for words, and sold it for a pension. Don’t think me scornful. Recollect that I have seen Pope and lived with Gray.’

[1148] Johnson is thus mentioned by Mrs. Sheridan in a letter dated, Blois, Nov. 16, 1743, according to the Garrick Corres , i. 17, but the date is wrongly given, as the Sheridans went to Blois in 1764: ‘I have heard Johnson decry some of the prettiest pieces of writing we have in English; yet Johnson is an honourable man—that is to say, he is a good critic, and in other respects a man of enormous talents.’

[1149] My position has been very well illustrated by Mr. Belsham of Bedford, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry . ‘The fashionable doctrine (says he) both of moralists and criticks in these times is, that virtue and happiness are constant concomitants; and it is regarded as a kind of dramatick impiety to maintain that virtue should not be rewarded, nor vice punished in the last scene of the last act of every tragedy. This conduct in our modern poets is, however, in my opinion, extremely injudicious; for, it labours in vain to inculcate a doctrine in theory, which every one knows to be false in fact, viz . that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness; and vice of misery. Thus Congreve concludes the Tragedy of The Mourning Bride with the following foolish couplet:—

‘For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds,

And though a late, a sure reward succeeds.’

‘When a man eminently virtuous, a Brutus, a Cato, or a Socrates, finally sink under the pressure of accumulated misfortune, we are not only led to entertain a more indignant hatred of vice than if he rose from his distress, but we are inevitably induced to cherish the sublime idea that a day of future retribution will arrive when he shall receive not merely poetical, but real and substantial justice.’ Essays Philosophical, Historical, and Literary , London, 1791, vol. II. 8vo. p. 317.

This is well reasoned and well expressed. I wish, indeed, that the ingenious authour had not thought it necessary to introduce any instance of ‘a man eminently virtuous;’ as he would then have avoided mentioning such a ruffian as Brutus under that description. Mr. Belsham discovers in his Essays so much reading and thinking, and good composition, that I regret his not having been fortunate enough to be educated a member of our excellent national establishment. Had he not been nursed in nonconformity, he probably would not have been tainted with those heresies (as I sincerely, and on no slight investigation, think them) both in religion and politicks, which, while I read, I am sure, with candour, I cannot read without offence. BOSWELL. Boswell’s ‘position has been illustrated’ with far greater force by Johnson. ‘It has been the boast of some swelling moralists, that every man’s fortune was in his own power, that prudence supplied the place of all other divinities, and that happiness is the unfailing consequence of virtue. But surely the quiver of Omnipotence is stored with arrows against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been boasted, is held up in vain; we do not always suffer by our crimes; we are not always protected by our innocence.’ The Adventurer , No. 120. See also Rasselas , chap. 27.

[1150] ‘Charles Fox said that Mrs. Sheridan’s Sydney Biddulph was the best of all modern novels. By the by [R. B.] Sheridan used to declare that he had never read it.’ Rogers’s Table-Talk , p. 90. The editor says, in a note on this passage:—‘The incident in The School for Scandal of Sir Oliver’s presenting himself to his relations in disguise is manifestly taken by Sheridan from his mother’s novel.’

[1151] No. 8.—The very place where I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the illustrious subject of this work, deserves to be particularly marked. I never pass by it without feeling reverence and regret. BOSWELL.

[1152] Johnson said:—‘Sir, Davies has learning enough to give credit to a clergyman.’ Post , 1780, in Mr. Langton’s Collection . The spiteful Steevens thus wrote about Davies:—‘His concern ought to be with the outside of books; but Dr. Johnson, Dr. Percy, and some others have made such a coxcomb of him, that he is now hardy enough to open volumes, turn over their leaves, and give his opinions of their contents. Did I ever tell you an anecdote of him? About ten years ago I wanted the Oxford Homer , and called at Davies’s to ask for it, as I had seen one thrown about his shop. Will you believe me, when I assure you he told me “he had but one, and that he kept for his own reading ?”’ Garrick Corres . i. 608.