p. 328. ["DR. JOHNSON TO MISS REYNOLDS, Reyn. tention of one of his friends has been dis- | whom all who knew his lordship, even covered by the publication of Mrs. Thrale's those who differed from him in politicks, Collection of Letters. In a letter to one of remember with much respect. the Miss Thrales, he writes," A friend, whose name I will tell when your mamma has tried to guess it, sent to my physician to inquire whether this long train of illness had brought me into difficulties for want of money, with an invitation to send to him for what occasion required. I shall write this night to thank him, having no need to borrow." And afterwards, in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, "Since you cannot guess, I will tell you, that the generous man was Gerard Hamilton. I returned him a very thankful and respectful letter." p. 342. I applied to Mr. Hamilton, by a common friend, and he has been so obliging as to let me have Johnson's letter to him upon this occasion, to adorn my collection. "DEAP. SIR,-Your kind inquiries after my affairs, and your generous offers, have been communicated to me by Dr. Brocklesby. I return thanks with great sincerity, having lived long enough to know what gratitude is due to such friendship; and entreat that my refusal may not be imputed to sullenness or pride. I am, indeed, in no want. Sickness is, by the generosity of my physicians, of little expense to me. But if any unexpected exigence should press me, you shall see, dear sir, how cheerfully I can be obliged to so much liberality. I am, sir, your most obedient and most humble servant, "SAM. JOHNSON." I find in this, as in forner years, notices of his kind attention to Mrs. Gardiner, who, though in the humble station of a tallow chandler upon Snow-hill, was a woman of excellent good sense, pious, and charitable 1. She told me she had been introduced to him by Mrs. Masters 2, the poetess, whose volumes he revised, and, it is said, illuminated here and there with a ray of his own genius. Mrs. Gardiner was very zealous for the support of the ladies' charity-school, in the parish of St. Sepulchre. It is confined to females; and, I am told, it afforded a hint for the story of "Betty Broom" in "The Idler." Johnson this year, I find, obtained for it a sermon from the late Bishop of St. Asaph, Dr. Shipley, whom he, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, characterises as "knowing and conversable; " and In his will Dr. Johnson left her a book" at her election, to keep as a token of remembrance." -MALONE. [See ante, vol. i. p. 102. She died in 1789, æt. 74.-E.] 2 [Ante, vol. i p. 102.—ED.] 46 VOL. II. "27th November, 1783. "DEAR MADAM,-I beg that you will let me know by this messenger MS. whether you will do me the honour of dining with me, and, if you will, whether we shall eat our dinner by our own selves, or call Mrs. Desmoulins. I am, dearest dear, your most humble servant, "SAM. JOHNSON."] The Earl of Carlisle having written a tragedy, entitled "The Father's Revenge," some of his lordship's friends applied to Mrs. Chapone 3, to prevail on Dr. Johnson to read and give his opinion of it, which he accordingly did, in a letter to that lady. Sir Joshua Reynolds having informed me that this letter was in Lord Carlisle's possession, though I was not fortunate enough to have the honour of being known to his lordship, trusting to the general courtesy of literature, I wrote to him, requesting the favour of a copy of it 4, and to be permitted to insert it in my Life of Dr. Johnson. His lordship was so good as to comply with my request, and has thus enabled me to enrich my work with a very fine piece of writing, which displays both the critical skill and politeness of my illustrious friend; and perhaps the curiosity which it will excite may induce the noble and elegant authour to gratify the world by the publication of a performance of which Dr. Johnson has spoken in such terms. TO MRS. CHAPONE. "28th November, 1783. "MADAM,-By sending the tragedy to me a second time 5, I think that a very honourable distinction has been shown me; and I did not delay the perusal, of which am now to tell the effect. "The construction of the play is not completely regular: the stage is too often vacant, and the scenes are not sufficiently connected. This, however, would be called by Dryden only a mechanical defect; which takes away little from the power of the poem, and which is seen rather than felt. "A rigid examiner of the diction might, perhaps, wish some words changed, and some lines more vigorously terminated. But from such petty imperfections what writer was ever free? "The general form and force of the dialogue is of more importance. It seems to want that quickness of reciprocation which characterises the English drama, and is not always sufficiently fervid or animated. "Of the sentiments, I remember not one that I wished omitted. In the imagery I cannot forbear to distinguish the comparison of joy succeeding grief to light rushing on the eye accustomed to darkness1. It seems to have all that can be desired to make it please. It is new, just, and delightful. "With the characters, either as conceived or preserved, I have no fault to find; but was much inclined to congratulate a writer who, in defiance of prejudice and fashion, made the archbishop a good man, and scorned all thoughtless applause, which a vicious churchman would have brought him. "The catastrophe is affecting. The father and daughter both culpable, both wretched, and both penitent, divide between them our pity and our sorrow. "Thus, madam, I have performed what I did not willingly undertake, and could not decently refuse. The noble writer will be pleased to remember that sincere criticism ought to raise no resentment, because judgment is not under the control of will; but involuntary criticism, as it has still less of choice, ought to be more remote from possibility of offence. I am, &c. "SAM. JOHNSON." 'TO MRS. LUCY PORTER, IN LICHFIELD. "London, 29th Nov. 1783. "DEAR MADAM,-You may perhaps think me negligent that I have not written to you again upon the loss of your brother; but condolences and consolations are such common and such useless things, that the omission of them is no great crime; and my own diseases occupy my mind and engage my care. My nights are miserably restless, and my days, therefore, are heavy. I try, however, to hold up my head as high as I ["DR. JOHNSON TO MISS REYNOLDS, "23d December, 1783. Reyn. "DEAREST MADAM,-You shall doubtless be very welcome to me on M Christmas day. I shall not dine alone, but the company will all be people whom we can stay with or leave. I will expect you at three, if I hear no more. I am this day a little better. I am, dear madam, your most humble servant, "SAM. JOHNSON. "I mean, do not be later than three; for as I am afraid I shall not be at church, you cannot come too soon." I consulted him on two questions of a very different nature: one, Whether the unconstitutional influence exercised by the peers of Scotland in the election of the representatives of the commons, by means of fictitious qualifications, ought not to be resisted; the other, What in-propriety and humanity should be done with old horses unable to labour. I gave him some account of my life at Auchinleck; and expressed my satisfaction that the gentlemen of the county had, at two publick meetings, elected me their præses or chairman. TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ. "London, 24th Dec. 1783. "DEAR SIR,-Like all other men who have great friends, you begin to feel the pangs of neglected merit; and all the comfort that I can give you is, by telling you that you have probably more pangs to feel, and more neglect to suffer. You have, indeed, begun to complain too soon; and I hope I am the only confidant of your discontent. Your friends have not yet had leisure to gratify personal kindness; they have hitherto been busy in strengthening their ministerial interest. If a vacancy happens in Scotland, give them early intelligence: and as you can serve government as powerfully as any of your probable competitors, you may make in some sort a warrantable claim. "Of the exaltations and depressions of your mind you delight to talk, and I hate to hear. Drive all such fancies from you. "On the day when I received your letter, I think, the foregoing page was written; to which one disease or another has hindered me from making any additions. I am now a little better. But sickness and solitude press me very heavily I could bear sickness better, if I were relieved from solitude. "The present dreadful confusion of the publick ought to make you wrap yourself up in your hereditary possessions, which, than you can want; and in an hour of rethough less than you may wish, are more ligious retirement return thanks to God, who has exempted you from any strong temptation to faction, treachery, plunder, and disloyalty. "As your neighbours distinguish you by such honours as they can bestow, content yourself with your station, without neglecting your profession. Your estate and the courts will find you full employment, and your mind well occupied will be quiet. "The usurpation of the nobility, for they apparently usurp all the influence they gain by fraud and misrepresentation, I think it certainly lawful, perhaps your duty, to resist. What is not their own, they have only by robbery. Your question about the horses gives me more perplexity. I know not well what advice to give you. I can only recommend a rule which you do not want: give as little pain as you can. I suppose that we have a right to their service while their strength lasts; what we can do with them afterwards, I cannot so easily determine. But let us consider. Nobody denies that man has a right first to milk the cow, and to shear the sheep, and then to kill them for his table. May he not, by parity of reason, first work a horse, and then kill him the easiest way, that he may have the means of another horse, or food for cows and sheep? Man is influenced in both cases by different motives of self-interest. He that rejects the one must reject the other. I am, &c. "SAM. JOHNSON. on Dr. Jonnson, who addressed me with one of his good-humoured smiles:—'Well, you have remembered our dispute about Prince Henry, and have cited me too. You have done your part very well indeed: you have made the best of your argument; but I am not convinced yet. "Before publishing the Lusiad, I sent Mr. Hoole a proof of that part of the introduction in which I make mention of Dr. Johnson, yourself, and other well-wishers to the work, begging it might be shown to Dr. Johnson. This was accordingly done; and in place of the simple mention of him which I had made, he dictated to Mr Hoole the sentence as it now stands. "Dr. Johnson told me in 1772, that, about twenty years before that time, he himself had a design to translate the Lusiad, of the merit of which he spoke highly, but had been prevented by a number of other engagements." Mr. Mickle reminds me in this letter of a conversation at dinner one day at Mr. Hoole's with Dr. Johnson, when Mr. Nicol, the king's bookseller, and I, attempted to controvert the maxim, "Better that ten guilty should escape, than one innocent person suffer;" and were answered by Dr. Johnson with great power of reasoning and eloquence. I am very sorry that I have no record of that day: but I well recollect my illustrious friend's having ably shown, that unless civil institutions ensure protection to "A happy and pious Christmas; and ma- the innocent, all the confidence which man-` ny happy years to you, your lady, and chil-kind should have in them would be lost. dren." The late ingenious Mr. Mickle, some time before his death, wrote me a letter concerning Dr. Johnson, in which he mentions, "I was upwards of twelve years acquainted with him, was frequently in his company, always talked with ease to him, and can truly say, that I never received from him one rough word." In this letter he relates his having, while engaged in translating the Lusiad, had a dispute of considerable length with Johnson, who, as usual, declaimed upon the misery and corruption of a sea life, and used this expression:-" It had been happy for the world, sir, if your hero Gama, Prince Henry of Portugal, and Columbus, had never been born, or that their schemes had never gone farther than their own imaginations." "This sentiment," says Mr. Mickle, "which is to be found in his Introduction to the World Displayed,' I, in my Dissertation prefixed to the Lusiad, have controverted; and though authours are said to be bad judges of their own works, I am not ashamed to own to a friend, that that dissertation is my favourite above all that I ever attempted in prose. Next year, when the Lusiad was published, I waited I shall here mention what, in strict chronological arrangement, should have appeared in my account of last year; but may more properly be introduced here, the controversy having not been closed till this. The Reverend Mr. Shaw 1, a native of one of the Hebrides, having entertained doubts of the authenticity of the poems ascribed to Ossian, divested himself of national bigotry; and having travelled in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and also in Ireland, in order to furnish himself with materials for a Gaelick Dictionary, which he afterwards compiled, was so fully satisfied that Dr. Johnson was in the right upon the question, that he candidly published a pamphlet, stating his conviction, and the proofs and reasons on which it was founded. A person at Edinburgh, of the name of Clark, answered this pamphlet with much zeal, and much abuse of its authour. Johnson took Mr. Shaw under his protection, and gave him his assistance in writing a reply, which has been admired by the best judges, and by many been considered as conclusive. A few paragraphs, which sufficiently mark their great authour, shall be selected. "My assertions are, for the most part, [See ante, p. 315-ED.] purely negative: I deny the existence of the Club should meet and dine at the house Fingal, because in a long and curious pere- which once was Horesman's, in Ivy-lane. grination through the Gaelick regions II have undertaken to solicit you, and therehave never been able to find it. What I fore desire you to tell on what day next could not see myself, I suspect to be equally week you can conveniently meet your old invisible to others; and I suspect with the friends.. I am, sir, your most humble sermore reason, as among all those who have vant, "SAM. JOHNSON." seen it no man can show it. "Mr. Clark compares the obstinacy of those who disbelieve the genuineness of Ossian to a blind man, who should dispute the reality of colours, and deny that the British troops are clothed in red. The blind man's doubt would be rational, if he did not know by experience that others have a power which he himself wants: but what perspicacity has Mr. Clark which Nature has withheld from me or the rest of mankind? "The true state of the parallel must be this: Suppose a man, with eyes like his neighbours, was told by a boasting corporal, that the troops, indeed, wore red clothes for their ordinary dress, but that every soldier had likewise a suit of black velvet, which he puts on when the king reviews them. This he thinks strange, and desires to see the fine clothes, but finds nobody in forty thousand men that can produce either coat or waistcoat. One, indeed, has left them in his chest at Port Mahon; another has always heard that he ought to have velvet clothes somewhere; and a third has heard somebody say that soldiers ought to wear velvet. Can the inquirer be blamed if he goes away believing that a soldier's red coat is all that he has? "But the most obdurate incredulity may be shamed or silenced by facts. To overpower contradictions, let the soldier show his velvet coat, and the Fingalist the original of Ossian. "The difference between us and the blind man is this: the blind man is unconvinced, because he cannot see; and we because, though we can see, we find nothing that can be shown." Notwithstanding the complication of disorders under which Johnson now laboured, he did not resign himself to despondency and discontent, but with wisdom and spirit endeavoured to console and amuse his mind with as many innocent enjoyments as he could procure. Sir John Hawkins has mentioned the cordiality with which he insisted that such of the members of the old club in Ivy-lane as survived should meet again and dine together, which they did twice at a tavern, and once at his house. The intended meeting was prevented by a circumstance, which the following note will explain: "Sd Dec. 1735. "With this invitation," says Sir John Hawkins, "I cheerfully complied, and met, at the time and place appointed, all who could be mustered of our society, namely, Johnson, Mr. Ryland, and Mr. Payne of the bank. When we were collected, the thought that we were so few occasioned some melancholy reflections, and I could not but compare our meeting, at such an advanced period of life as it was to us all, to that of the four old men in the 'Senile Colloquium' of Erasmus. We dined, and in the evening regaled with coffee. At ten we broke up, much to the regret of Johnson, who pro- p. 562. posed staying; but finding us inclined to separate, he left us, with a sigh that seemed to come from his heart, lamenting that he was retiring to solitude and cheerless meditation. Hawk. "Johnson had proposed a meeting like this once a month, and we had one more; but, the time approaching for a third, he began to feel a return of some of his complaints, and signified a wish that we would dine with him at his own house; and accordingly we met there, and were very cheerfully entertained by him."] [Of this meeting he gave the following account to Mrs. Thrale: stituted a club at the Essex Head, in Essex-street, then kept by Samuel Greaves, an old servant of Mr. Thrale's. 66 TO SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. "4th December, 1783. "DEAR SIR,-It is inconvenient to me to come out; I should else have waited on you with an account of a little evening club which we are establishing in Essex-street in the Strand, and of which you are desired to be one. It will be held at the Essex Head, now kept by an old servant of Thrale's The company is numerous, and, as you will see by the list, miscellaneous. The terms are lax, and the expenses light. Mr. Barry was adopted by Dr. Brocklesby, who joined with me in forming the plan. We meet thrice a week, and he who misses forfeits two-pence. "If you are willing to become a meinber, draw a line under your name. Return the list. We meet for the first time on Monday at eight. I am, &c. "SAM. JOHNSON." It did not suit 1 Sir Joshua to be one of this club. But when I mention only Mr. Daines Barrington, Dr. Brocklesby, Mr. Murphy, Mr. John Nichols, Mr. Cooke 2, Mr. Joddrel, Mr. Paradise, Dr. Horseley, Mr. Windham 3, I shall sufficiently obviate the misrepresentation of it by Sir John Hawkins, as if it had been a low alehouse association 4, by which Johnson was degraded. 1 [Johnson himself, by the mention of Barry the painter, seems to have anticipated some reluctance on the part of Sir Joshua. Indeed, the violence of Barry's temper, and the absurdity of his conduct, rendered him no very agreeable companion; but towards Sir Joshua his behaviour had been particularly offensive.-ED.] 2 [A biographical notice of Mr. Cooke, who died April 3, 1824, will be found in the Gentleman's Magazine for that month; and some account of Mr. Joddrel is given in Nichols's Lit. Anec. vol. viii.-ED.] 3 I was in Scotland when this club was founded, and during all the winter. Johnson, however, declared I should be a member, and invented a word upon the occasion: "Boswell," said he, "is a very clubable man.' I When I came to town I was proposed by Mr. Barrington, and chosen. believe there are few societies where there is better conversation or more decorum. Several of us resolved to continue it after our great founder was removed by death. Other members were added; and now, about eight years since that loss, we go on happily. Johnson's definition of a club, in this sense, in his Dictionary, is "An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions." -BOSWELL. Johnson himself, like his namesake Old Ben, composed the rules of his Club.. "RULES. "To-day deep thoughts with me resolve to drench In mirth, which after no repenting draws.MILTON. "The club shall consist of four and twenty. "The meetings shall be on the Monday, Thursday, and Saturday of every week;. but in the week before Easter there shall be no meeting. "Every member is at liberty to introduce a friend once a week, but not oftener. "Two members. shall oblige themselves to attend in their turn every night from eight to ten, or to procure two to attend in their room. "Every member present at the club shall spend at least sixpence; and every member who stays away shall forfeit threepence. "The master of the house shall keep an account of the absent members; and deliver to the president of the night a list of the forfeits incurred. "When any member returns after absence, he shall immediately lay down his forfeits; which if he omits to do, the president shall require. "There shall be no general reckoning, but every man shall adjust his own expenses. "The night of indispensable attendance will come to every member once a month. Whoever shall for three months together omit to attend himself, or by substitution, nor shall make any apology in the fourth month, shall be considered as having abdicated the club. "When a vacancy is to be filled, the name of the candidate, and of the member recommending him, shall stand in the club room three nights. On the fourth he may be chosen by ballot; six members at least being present, and two-thirds of the ballot being in his favour; or the majority, should the numbers not be divisible by three. "The master of the house shall give notice, six days before, to each of those members whose turn of necessary attendance is come. "The notice may be in these words:the -ofwill be Sir, On your turn of presiding at the Essex Head. Your company is therefore earnestly requested. "One penny shall be left by each member for the waiter." In the end of this year he was seized with a spasmodic asthma of such violence, that he was confined to the house in great pain, being sometimes obliged to sit all night in his chair, a recumbent posture being so hurt [Miss Hawkins candidly says, Boswell was well justified in his resentment of my father's designation of this as a sixpenny club at an alehouse. I am sorry my father permitted himself ing, I dare say he did not like being passed over." to be so pettish on the subject. Honestly speak--Mem. vol. ii. p. 104.-ED.] |