Life of Johnson Volume III Part 67

_Hudibras_, i. I. 45.

[822] 'Among the sentiments which almost every man changes as he advances into years is the expectation of uniformity of character.'

_The Rambler_, No. 70. See _ante_, i. 161, note 2.

[823] See _ante_, iii. 55.

[824] After this follows a line which Boswell has omitted:--'Then rises fresh, pursues his wonted game.' _Cato_, act i. sc. 4.

[825] Boswell was right, and Oglethorpe wrong; the exclamation in Suetonius is, 'Utinam _populus_ Roma.n.u.s unam cervicem haberet.' Calig.

x.x.x.--CROKER.

[826] 'Macaroon (_macarone_, Italian), a coa.r.s.e, rude, low fellow; whence, _macaronick_ poetry, in which the language is purposely corrupted.' Johnson's _Dictionary_. '_Macaroni_, probably from old Italian _maccare, to bruise, to batter, to pester_; Derivative, _macaronic_, i.e. in a confused or mixed state (applied to a jumble of languages).' Skeat's _Etymological Diet_.

[827] _Polemo-middinia_, as the Commentator explains, is _Proelium in sterquilinio commissum_. In the opening lines the poet thus calls on the Skipperii, or _Skippers_:--

'Linquite skellatas botas, s.h.i.+ppasque picatas, Whistlantesque simul fechtam memorate blodeam, Fechtam terribilem, quam marvellaverat omnis Banda Deum, quoque Nympharum c.o.c.kelshelearum.'

[828] In Best's _Memorials_, p. 63, is given another of these lines that Mr. Langton repeated:--'Five-poundon elendeto, ah! mala simplos.'

For Joshua Barnes see _post_, 1780, in Mr. Langton's _Collection_.

[829] See _ante_, iii. 78.

[830] Dr. Johnson, describing her needle-work in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, vol. i. p. 326, uses the learned word _sutile_; which Mrs.

Thrale has mistaken, and made the phrase injurious by writing '_futile_ pictures.' BOSWELL. See _post_, p. 299.

[831] See _ante_, ii. 252, note 2.

[832] The revolution of 1772. The book was published in 1778. Charles Sheridan was the elder brother of R.B. Sheridan.

[833] See _ante_, i. 467.

[834] As Physicians are called _the Faculty_, and Counsellors at Law _the Profession_; the Booksellers of London are denominated _the Trade_. Johnson disapproved of these denominations. BOSWELL. Johnson himself once used this 'denomination.' _Ante_, i. 438.

[835] See _ante_, ii. 385.

[836] A translation of these forged letters which were written by M. de Caraccioli was published in 1776. By the _Gent. Mag_. (xlvi. 563) they were accepted as genuine. In _The Ann. Reg_. for the same year (xix. 185) was published a translation the letter in which Voltaire had attacked their authenticity. The pa.s.sage that Johnson quotes is the following:--'On est en droit de lui dire ce qu'on dit autrefois a l'abbe Nodot: "Montrez-nous votre ma.n.u.script de Petrone, trouve a Belgrade, ou consentez a n'etre cru of de personne."' Voltaire's _Works_, xliii.

544.

[837] Baretti (_Journey from London to Genoa_, i. 9) says that he saw in 1760, near Honiton, at a small rivulet, 'an engine called a ducking-stool; a kind of armed wooden chair, fixed on the extremity of a pole about fifteen feet long. The pole is horizontally placed on a post just by the water, and loosely pegged to that post; so that by raising it at one end, you lower the stool down into the midst of the river.

That stool serves at present to duck scolds and termagants.'

[838] 'An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.' _Much Ado about Nothing_, act iii. sc. 5.

[839] See _ante_, ii. 9.

[840] 'One star differeth from another star in glory.' I Cor. xv. 41.

[841] See _ante_, iii. 48, 280.

[842] 'The physicians in Hogarth's prints are not caricatures: the full dress with a sword and _a great tye-wig_, and the hat under the arm, and the doctors in consultation, each smelling to a gold-headed cane shaped like a parish-beadle's staff, are pictures of real life in his time, and myself have seen a young physician thus equipped walk the streets of London without attracting the eyes of pa.s.sengers.' Hawkins's _Johnson_, p. 238. Dr. T. Campbell in 1777, writing of Dublin to a London physician, says:--'No sooner were your _medical wigs_ laid aside than an attempt was made to do the like here. But in vain.' _Survey of the South of Ireland_, p. 463.

[843] 'Jenyns,' wrote Malone, on the authority of W.G. Hamilton, 'could not be made without much labour to comprehend an argument. If however there was anything weak or ridiculous in what another said, he always laid hold of it and played upon it with success. He looked at everything with a view to pleasantry alone. This being his grand object, and he being no reasoner, his best friends were at a loss to know whether his book upon Christianity was serious or ironical.' Prior's _Malone_, p. 375.

[844] Jenyns maintains (p. 51) that 'valour, patriotism, and friends.h.i.+p are only fict.i.tious virtues--in fact no virtue at all.'

[845] He had furnished an answer to this in _The Rambler_, No. 99, where he says:--'To love all men is our duty so far as it includes a general habit of benevolence, and readiness of occasional kindness; but to love all equally is impossible.... The necessities of our condition require a thousand offices of tenderness, which mere regard for the species will never dictate. Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friends.h.i.+p will discover and remedy, and which would remain for ever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attentive to every misery.' See _ante_, i. 207, note 1.

[846] _Galatians_, vi. 10.

[847] _St. John_, xxi. 20. Compare Jeremy Taylor's _Measures and Offices of Friends.h.i.+p_, ch. i. 4.

[848] In the first two editions 'from this _amiable and_ pleasing subject.'

[849] _Acts of the Apostles_, ix. i.

[850] See _ante_, ii. 82.

[851] If any of my readers are disturbed by this th.o.r.n.y question, I beg leave to recommend, to them Letter 69 of Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_; and the late Mr. John Palmer of Islington's Answer to Dr.

Priestley's mechanical arguments for what he absurdly calls 'Philosophical Necessity.' BOSWELL. See _post_, under Aug. 29, 1783; note.

[852] See _ante_, ii. 217, and iii. 55.

[853] 'I have proved,' writes Mandeville (_Fables of the Bees_, ed.

1724, p. 179), 'that the real pleasures of all men in nature are worldly and sensual, if we judge from their practice; I say all men in nature, because devout Christians, who alone are to be excepted here, being regenerated and preternaturally a.s.sisted by the divine grace, cannot be said to be in nature.'

[854] Mandeville describes with great force the misery caused by gin-- 'liquid poison' he calls it--'which in the f.a.g-end and outskirts of the town is sold in some part or other of almost every house, frequently in cellars, and sometimes in the garret.' He continues:--'The short-sighted vulgar in the chain of causes seldom can see further than one link; but those who can enlarge their view may in a hundred places see good spring up and pullulate from evil, as naturally as chickens do from eggs.' He instances the great gain to the revenue, and to all employed in the production of the spirit from the husbandman upwards.

_Fable of the Bees_, p. 89.

[855] 'If a miser, who is almost a plum (i.e. worth 100,000, _Johnson's Dictionary_), and spends but fifty pounds a year, should be robbed of a thousand guineas, it is certain that as soon as this money should come to circulate, the nation would be the better for the robbery; yet justice and the peace of the society require that the robber should be hanged.' _Ib_. p. 83.

[856] Johnson, in his political economy, seems to have been very much under Mandeville's influence. Thus in attacking Milton's position that 'a popular government was the most frugal; for the trappings of a monarchy would set up our ordinary commonwealth,' he says, 'The support and expense of a court is, for the most part, only a particular kind of traffick, by which money is circulated, without any national impoverishment.' _Works_, vii. 116. Mandeville in much the same way says:--'When a covetous statesman is gone, who spent his whole life in fattening himself with the spoils of the nation, and had by pinching and plundering heaped up an immense treasure, it ought to fill every good member of the society with joy to behold the uncommon profuseness of his son. This is refunding to the public whatever was robbed from it. As long as the nation has its own back again, we ought not to quarrel with the manner in which the plunder is repaid.' _Ib_. p. 104.

[857] See _ante_, ii. 176.

[858] In _The Adventurer_, No. 50, Johnson writes:--'"The devils," says Sir Thomas Brown, "do not tell lies to one another; for truth is necessary to all societies; nor can the society of h.e.l.l subsist without it."' Mr. Wilkin, the editor of Brown's _Works_ (ed. 1836, i. liv), says:--'I should be glad to know the authority of this a.s.sertion.'

I infer from this that the pa.s.sage is not in Brown's _Works_.

[859] Hannah More: see _post_, under date of June 30, 1784.

[860] In her visits to London she was commonly the guest of the Garricks. A few months before this conversation Garrick wrote a prologue and epilogue for her tragedy of _Percy_. He invested for her the money that she made by this play. H. More's _Memoirs_, i. 122, 140.

[861] In April 1784 she records (_ib_. i. 319) that she called on Johnson shortly after she wrote _Le Bas Bleu_. 'As to it,' she continues, 'all the flattery I ever received from everybody together would not make up his sum. He said there was no name in poetry that might not be glad to own it. All this from Johnson, that parsimonious praiser!' He wrote of it to Mrs. Thrale on April 19, 1784:--'It is in my opinion a very great performance.' _Piozzi Letters_, ii. 364. Dr.

Beattie wrote on July 31, 1784:--'Johnson told me with great solemnity that Miss More was "the most powerful versificatrix" in the English language.' Forbes's _Beattie_, ed. 1824, p. 320.

[862] See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Aug. 18.

[863] The ancestor of Mr. Murray of Albemarle Street.