c Mr. Thrale.
d In Johnson’s Dictionary is neither dawling nor dawdling. He uses dawdle, post, p. 833.
e I have taken the liberty to leave out a few lines.
a Spectator, 470.
a Vol. ii, p. 143, et seq. I have selected passages from several letters, without mentioning dates.
b June 2.
a [Lord George Gordon and his followers, during these outrages, wore blue ribbands in their hats.]
a Vol. ii, p. 163. Mrs. Piozzi has omitted the name, she best knows why.
a Now settled in London.
b Meaning his entertaining Memoirs of David Garrick, Esq., of which Johnson (as Davies informed me) wrote the first sentence; thus giving, as it were, the key-note to the performance. It is, indeed, very characteristical of its authour, beginning with a maxim, and proceeding to illustrate. – ‘All excellence has a right to be recorded. I shall, therefore, think it superfluous to apologise for writing the life of a man, who by an uncommon assemblage of private virtues, adorned the highest eminence in a publick profession.’
c I wish he had omitted the suspicion expressed here, though I believe he meant nothing but jocularity; for though he and I differed sometimes in opinion, he well knew how much I loved and revered him. Beattie.
a It will, no doubt, be remarked how he avoids the rebellious land of America. This puts me in mind of an anecdote, for which I am obliged to my worthy social friend, Governour Richard Penn: ‘At one of Miss E. Hervey’s assemblies, Dr. Johnson was following her up and down the room; upon which Lord Abingdon observed to her, “Your great friend is very fond of you; you can go no where without him.” – “Ay, (said she,) he would follow me to any part of the world.” – “Then (said the Earl,) ask him to go with you to America”’
b Essays on the History of Mankind.
a Dr. Percy, now Bishop of Dromore.
a I had not then seen his letters to Mrs. Thrale.
a Pr. and Med. p. 185.
a Secretary to the British Herring Fishery, remarkable for an extraordinary number of occasional verses, not of eminent merit.
b Luke vii. 50.
a [In a letter written by Johnson to a friend in 1742-3, he says: – ‘I never see Garrick.’]
a Here Lord Macartney remarks, ‘A Bramin or any cast of the Hindoos will neither admit you to be of their religion, nor be converted to yours; – a thing which struck the Portuguese with the greatest astonishment, when they discovered the East Indies.’
a The correspondent of The Gentleman’s Magazine who subscribes himself Sciolus furnishes the following supplement: –
‘A lady of my acquaintance remembers to have heard her uncle954 sing those homely stanzas more than 45 years ago. He repeated the second thus;
“She shall breed young lords and ladies fair,
And ride abroad in a coach and three pair,
And the best, &c.
And have a house, &c.”
And remembered a third which seems to have been the introductory one, and is believed to have been the only remaining one: –
“When the Duke of Leeds shall have made his choice
Of a charming young lady that’s beautiful and wise,
She’ll be the happiest young gentlewoman under the skies,
As long as the sun and moon shall rise,
And how happy shall, &c.”’955
It is with pleasure I add that this stanza could never be more truly applied than at this present time.
a [It should be remembered, that this was said twenty-five or thirty years ago, when lace was very generally worn.]
a Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Cowley, says, that these are ‘the only English verses which Bentley is known to have written.’ I shall here insert them, and hope my readers will apply them.
‘Who strives to mount Parnassus’ hill,966
And thence poetick laurels bring,
Must first acquire due force and skill,
Must fly with swan’s or eagle’s wing.
Who Nature’s treasures would explore,
Her mysteries and arcana know;
Must high as lofty Newton soar,
Must stoop as delving Woodward low.
Who studies ancient laws and rites,
Tongues, arts, and arms, and history;
Must drudge, like Selden, days and nights,
And in the endless labour die.
Who travels in religious jars,
(Truth mixt with errour, shades with rays;)
Like Whiston, wanting pyx or stars,
In ocean wide or sinks or strays.
But grant our hero’s hope, long toil
And comprehensive genius crown,
All sciences, all arts his spoil,
Yet what reward, or what renown?
Envy, innate in vulgar souls,
Envy steps in and stops his rise,
Envy with poison’d tarnish fouls
His lustre, and his worth decries.
He lives inglorious or in want,
To college and old books confin’d;
Instead of learn’d he’s call’d pedant,
Dunces advanc’d, he’s left behind:
Yet left content a genuine Stoick he,
Great without patron, rich without South Sea.967
b The difference between Johnson and Smith is apparent even in this slight instance. Smith was a man of extraordinary application, and had his mind crowded with all manner of subjects; but the force, acuteness, and vivacity of Johnson were not to be found there. He had book-making so much in his thoughts, and was so chary of what might be turned to account in that way, that he once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, that he made it a rule, when in company, never to talk of what he understood. Beauclerk had for a short time a pretty high opinion of Smith’s conversation. Garrick, after listening to him for a while, as to one of whom his expectations had been raised, turned slyly to a friend,968 and whispered him, ‘What say you to this? – eh? flabby, I think.’
a I am sorry to see in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. ii, An Essay on the Character of Hamlet, written, I should suppose, by a very young man,970 though called ‘Reverend’; who speaks with presumptuous petulance of the first literary character of his age. Amidst a cloudy confusion of words, (which hath of late too often passed in Scotland for Metaphysicks,) he thus ventures to criticise one of the noblest lines in our language: – ‘Dr. Johnson has remarked, that “time toil’d after him in vain.” But I should apprehend, that this is entirely to mistake the character. Time toils after every great man, as well as after Shakspeare. The workings of an ordinary mind keep pace, indeed, with time; they move no faster; they have their beginning, their middle, and their end; but superiour natures can reduce these into a point. They do not, indeed, suppress them; but they suspend, or they lock them up in the breast.’ The learned Society, under whose sanction such gabble is ushered into the world, would do well to offer a premium to any one who will discover its meaning.