Life of Johnson Volume III Part 51

[253] It was not 'last year' but on June 22, 1772, that the negro, James Somerset--who had been brought to England by his master, had escaped from him, had been seized, and confined in irons on board a s.h.i.+p in The Thames that was bound for Jamaica, and had been brought on a writ of _Habeas Corpus_ before the Court of King's Bench was discharged by Lord Mansfield. Howell's _State Trials_, xx. 79, and Lofft's _Reports_, 1772, p. 1. 'Lord Mansfield,' writes Lord Campbell (_Lives of the Chief Justices_, ii. 418), 'first established the grand doctrine that the air of England is too pure to be breathed by a slave.' According to Lord Campbell, Mansfield's judgment thus ended:--'The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it. Every man who comes into England is ent.i.tled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may heretofore have suffered, and whatever may be the colour of his skin:

'"Quamvis ille niger, quamvis tu candidus esses."

'Let the negro be discharged.'

Where Lord Campbell found this speech, that is to say if he did not put it together himself, I cannot guess. Mansfield's judgment was very brief. He says in the conclusion:--'The only question before us is, whether the cause on the return [to the writ of _habeas corpus_] is sufficient. If it is, the negro must be remanded; if it is not, he must be discharged. Accordingly the return states that the slave departed, and refused to serve; whereupon he was kept to be sold abroad. So high an act of dominion must be recognised by the law of the country where it is used. The power of a master over his slave has been extremely different in different countries. The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political.... It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences therefore may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.' Lofft's _Reports_, 1772, p. 19. 'The judgment of the court,' says Broom (_Const.i.tutional Law_, 1885, p. 99), 'was delivered by Lord Mansfield, C.J., after some delay, and with evident reluctance.' The pa.s.sage about the air of England that Campbell puts into Mansfield's mouth is found in Mr.

Hargrave's argument on May 14, 1772, where he speaks of England as 'a soil whose air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in.' Lofft's _Reports_, p. 2. Mr. Dunning replied:--'Let me take notice, neither the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in, nor the laws of England have rejected servitude.' _Ib_. p. 12. Serjeant Davy rejoined:--'It has been a.s.serted, and is now repeated by me, this air is too pure for a slave to breathe in. I trust I shall not quit this court without certain conviction of the truth of that a.s.sertion.' _Ib_. p. 17.

Lord Mansfield said nothing about the air. The line from Virgil, with which Lord Campbell makes Mansfield's speech end, was 'the happily chosen motto' to Maclaurin's published argument for the negro; Joseph Knight, _post_, under Nov. 29, 1777.

[254] The son of Johnson's old friend, Mr. William Drummond. (See vol.

ii. pp. 26-29.) He was a young man of such distinguished merit, that he was nominated to one of the medical professors.h.i.+ps in the College of Edinburgh without solicitation, while he was at Naples. Having other views, he did not accept of the honour, and soon afterwards died.

BOSWELL.

[255] In the third and subsequent editions the date is wrongly given as the 16th.

[256] A Florentine n.o.bleman, mentioned by Johnson in his _Notes of his Tour in France_ [_ante_, Oct. 18, 1775]. I had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with him in London, in the spring of this year. BOSWELL. Mrs.

Thrale wrote to Johnson from Bath on May 16:--'Count Manucci would wait seven years to come with you; so do not disappoint the man, but bring him along with you. His delight in your company is like Boniface's exultation when the squire speaks Latin; for understand you he certainly cannot.' _Piozzi Letters_, i. 328. It was not the squire, but the priest, Foigard, who by his Latin did Boniface good.

_The Beaux Strategem_, act iii. sc. 2.

[257] _Pr. and Med_. p. 151.

[258] _St. James_, i. 17.

[259] See _ante_, ii. 175. Seven and even eight years later Paterson was still a student in need of Johnson's recommendation. _Post_, June 2, 1783, and April 5, 1784.

[260] See _ante_, p. 58.

[261] Why his Lords.h.i.+p uses the epithet _pleasantly_, when speaking of a grave piece of reasoning, I cannot conceive. But different men have different notions of pleasantry. I happened to sit by a gentleman one evening at the Opera-house in London, who, at the moment when _Medea_ appeared to be in great agony at the thought of killing her children, turned to me with a smile, and said, '_funny_ enough.' BOSWELL.

[262] Dr. Johnson afterwards told me, that he was of opinion that a clergyman had this right. BOSWELL.

[263] Johnson, nearly three years earlier, had said of Granger:--'The dog is a Whig. I do not like much to see a Whig in any dress; but I hate to see a Whig in a parson's gown.' Boswell's _Hebrides_, Sept. 24, 1773.

[264] 'I did my utmost,' wrote Horace Walpole (_Letters_, v. 168), 'to dissuade Mr. Granger from the dedication, and took especial pains to get my _virtues_ left out of the question.'

[265]

'In moderation placing all my glory, While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.'

Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, Bk. ii Sat. I. 1. 67.

[266] 'One of the dippers at Brighthelmstone, seeing Mr. Johnson swim in the year 1766, said:--"Why, Sir, you must have been a stout-hearted gentleman forty years ago."' _Piozzi's Anec_. p. 113. Johnson, in his verses ent.i.tled, _In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfeldiae diffluentem_ (_Works_, i. 163), writes:--

'Errat adhuc vitreus per prata virentia rivus, Quo toties lavi membra tenella puer; Hic delusa rudi frustrabar brachia motu, Dum docuit blanda voce natare pater.'

[267] For this and Dr. Johnson's other letters to Mr. Levett, I am indebted to my old acquaintance Mr. Nathaniel Thomas, whose worth and ingenuity have been long known to a respectable, though not a wide circle; and whose collection of medals would do credit to persons of greater opulence. BOSWELL.

[268] Johnson's letters to Mrs. Thrale shew the difference between modern Brighton and the Brighthelmstone of his days. Thus he writes:-- 'Ashbourne, Sept. 27, 1777. I know not when I shall write again, now you are going to the world's end [i.e. Brighton]. _Extra anni solisque vias_, where the post will be a long time in reaching you. I shall, notwithstanding all distance, continue to think on you.' _Piozzi Letters_, i. 387. 'Oct. 6, 1777. Methinks you are now a great way off; and if I come, I have a great way to come to you; and then the sea is so cold, and the rooms are so dull; yet I do love to hear the sea roar and my mistress talk--For when she talks, ye G.o.ds! how she will talk. I wish I were with you, but we are now near half the length of England asunder.

It is frightful to think how much time must pa.s.s between writing this letter and receiving an answer, if any answer were necessary.'

_Ib_. ii. 2.

[269] Boswell wrote to Temple on Nov. 3, 1780:--'I could not help smiling at the expostulation which you suggest to me to try with my father. It would do admirably with some fathers; but it would make mine much worse, for he cannot bear that his son should talk with him as a man. I can only lament his unmelting coldness to my wife and children, for I fear it is hopeless to think of his ever being more affectionate towards them. Yet it must be acknowledged that his paying 1000 of my debt some years ago was a large bounty. He allows me 300 a year.'

_Letters of Boswell_, p. 255.

[270] See _ante_, Aug. 27, 1775, note.

[271] See _ante_, p. 48, note 4.

[272] 'He said to me often that the time he spent in this Tour was the pleasantest part of his life, and asked me if I would lose the recollection of it for five hundred pounds.' Boswell's _Hebrides_, under Nov. 22, 1773.

[273] Chap. viii. 10. A translation of this work is in _Bibliotheca Pastorum_, ed. J. Ruskin, vol. i.

[274] 'The chief cause of my deficiency has been a life immethodical and unsettled, which breaks all purposes, confounds and suppresses memory, and perhaps leaves too much leisure to imagination.' _Pr. and Med_. p. 136.

[275] Johnson wrote to Boswell (_ante_, June 12, 1774):--'I have stipulated twenty-five for you to give in your own name.' The book was published early in 1775. On Feb. 25, 1775, he wrote:--'I am sorry that I could get no books for my friends in Scotland. Mr. Strahan has at last promised to send two dozen to you.' It is strange that not far short of two years pa.s.sed before the books were sent.

[276] Boswell had 'expressed his extreme aversion to his father's second marriage.' _Letters of Boswell_, p. 255--On Sept. 2, 1775, he thus described his step-mother:--'His wife, whom in my conscience I cannot condemn for any capital bad quality, is so narrow-minded, and, I don't know how, so set upon keeping him under her own management, and so suspicious and so sourishly tempered that it requires the utmost exertion of practical philosophy to keep myself quiet.' _Ib_. p. 216.

[277] See _ante_, Jan. 19 and May 6, 1775.

[278] See _ante_, p. 86.

[279] See _ante_, May 27, 1775.

[280] Macquarry was the chief of Ulva's Isle. 'He told us,' writes Boswell, 'his family had possessed Ulva for nine hundred years; but I was distressed to hear that it was soon to be sold for payment of his debts.' Boswell's _Hebrides_, Oct 16, 1773.

[281] See _ante_, March 24, 1776.

[282] Mrs. Thrale gives a long but scarcely credible account of her quarrel with Baretti. It is very unlikely that he used to say to her eldest daughter 'that, if her mother died in a lying-in which happened while he lived here, he hoped Mr. Thrale would marry Miss Whitbred, who would be a pretty companion for her, and not tyrannical and overbearing like me.' Hayward's _Piozzi_, ii. 336. No doubt in 1788 he attacked her brutally (see _ante_, p. 49). 'I could not have suspected him,' wrote Miss Burney, 'of a bitterness of invective so cruel, so ferocious.' Mme.

D'Arblay's _Diary_, iv. 185. The attack was provoked. Mrs. Piozzi, in January, 1788, published one of Johnson's letters, in which he wrote--at all events she says he wrote:--'Poor B----i! do not quarrel with him; to neglect him a little will be sufficient. He means only to be frank, and manly, and independent, and perhaps, as you say, a little wise. To be frank he thinks is to be cynical, and to be independent is to be rude.

Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather because of his misbehaviour I am afraid he learnt part of me. I hope to set him hereafter a better example.' _Piozzi Letters_, i. 277. Malone, in 1789, speaks of 'the roughness for which Baretti was formerly distinguished.' Prior's _Malone_, p. 391. Mrs. Thrale thus describes his departure: 'My daughter kept on telling me that Mr. Baretti was grown very old and very cross, would not look at her exercises, but said he would leave this house soon, for it was no better than Pandaemonium. The next day he packed up his cloke-bag, which he had not done for three years, and sent it to town; and while we were wondering what he would say about it at breakfast, he was walking to London himself, without taking leave of any one person, except it may be the girl, who owns they had much talk, in the course of which he expressed great aversion to me and even to her, who, [_sic_] he said, he once thought well of.' Hayward's _Piozzi_, ii.

339. Baretti, in the _Eur. Mag_. xiii. 398, told his story. He said:--'Madam took it into her head to give herself airs, and treat me with some coldness and superciliousness. I did not hesitate to set down at breakfast my dish of tea not half drank, go for my hat and stick that lay in the corner of the room, turn my back to the house _insalutato hospite_, and walk away to London without uttering a syllable.' In a marginal note on _Piozzi Letters_, i. 338, he says he left Streatham on June 4, 1776. 'I had,' he writes, 'by that time been in a manner one of the family during six years and a-half. Johnson had made me hope that Thrale would at last give me an annuity for my pains, but, never receiving a s.h.i.+lling from him or from her, I grew tired at last, and on some provocation from her left them abruptly.' It should seem that he afterwards made it up with them, for in a note on vol. ii. p. 191, he says of the day of Mr. Thrale's death, 'Johnson and I, and many other friends, were to dine with him that day.' The rest of the note, at all events, is inaccurate, for he says that 'Mrs. Thrale imparted to Johnson the news [of her husband's death],' whereas Johnson saw him die.

[283] Mrs. Piozzi says that this money was given to Baretti as a consolation for the loss of the Italian tour (_ante_, iii. 6). Hayward's _Piozzi_, ii. 337.

[284] The Duke of York was present when Foote had the accident by which he lost his leg (_ante_, ii. 95). Moved by compa.s.sion, he obtained for him from the King a royal patent for performances at the Haymarket from May 14 to Sept. 14 in every year. He played but thrice after his retirement. Forster's Essays, ii. 400, 435.

[285] Strahan showed greater sagacity about Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, which had been declined by Elmsly. 'So moderate were our hopes,' writes Gibbon (_Misc. Works_, i. 223), 'that the original impression had been stinted to five hundred, till the number was doubled by the prophetic taste of Mr. Strahan.' Carrick called Strahan 'rather an _obtuse_ man.'

_Post_, April 9 1778.

[286] See _post_, Sept. 19, 1777, and April 20, 1781.

[287] Johnson, I believe, at this time suffered less than usual from despondency. See _ante_, iii. 25, note 1. The pa.s.sage in which these words are found applies to one day only. It is as follows:--'March 28.

This day is Good Friday. It is likewise the day on which my poor Tetty was taken from me. My thoughts were disturbed in bed. I remembered that it was my wife's dying day, and begged pardon for all our sins, and commended her; but resolved to mix little of my own sorrows or cares with the great solemnity. Having taken only tea without milk I went to church; had time before service to commend my wife, and wished to join quietly in the service, but I did not hear well, and my mind grew unsettled and perplexed. Having rested ill in the night I slumbered at the sermon, which, I think, I could not as I sat perfectly hear.... At night I had some ease. L.D. [Laus Deo] I had prayed for pardon and peace.' _Pr. and Med_. p. 153. Hawkins, however (_Life_, p. 532), says, perhaps with considerable exaggeration, that at this time, 'he sunk into indolence, till his faculties seemed to be impaired; deafness grew upon him; long intervals of mental absence interrupted his conversation, and it was difficult to engage his attention to any subject. His friends concluded that his lamp was emitting its last rays, but the lapse of a short period gave them ample proofs to the contrary.' The proofs were _The Lives of the Poets_. Johnson himself says of this time:--'Days and months pa.s.s in a dream; and I am afraid that my memory grows less tenacious, and my observation less attentive.' _Pr. and Med_. 160.

[288]

'Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind Sees G.o.d in clouds, or hears him in the wind.'