We sur Duke of en Mary and als of all repeat the ell dinner Lord us of a Swift had personally offended him, and he told me he had not. He said to-day, "Swift is clear, but he is shallow. In coarse humour he is inferior to Arbuthnot; in delicate humour he is inferior to Addison. So he is inferior to his contemporaries, without putting him against the whole world. I doubt if the Tale of a Tub' was his; it has so much more thinking, more knowledge, more power, more colour, than any of the works which are indisputably his. If it was his, I shall only say, he was impar sibi." We gave him as good a dinner as we could. Our Scotch muir-fowl, or grouse, were then abundant, and quite in season; and so far as wisdom and wit can be aided by Rabe administering agreeable sensations to the palate, my wife took care that our great guest should not be deficient. ulkner reland Tears ୧୮୧୮ 2 poor judies Sir Adolphus Oughton, then our deputy commander-inchief, who was not only an excellent officer, but one of the most universal scholars 1 I ever knew, had learned the Erse language, and expressed his belief in the authenticity of Ossian's Poetry. Dr. Johnson took the opposite side of that perplexed question, and I was afraid the dispute would have run high between them. But Sir Adolphus, who had a very sweet temper, changed the discourse, grew playful, laughed at Lord Monboddo's notion of men having tails, and called him a judge à posteriori, which amused Dr. Johnson, and thus hostilities were prevented. At supper we had Dr. Cullen, his son the advocate, Dr. Adam Fergusson, and Mr. Crosbie, advocate. Witchcraft was introduced. Mr. Crosbie said he thought it the greatest blasphemy to suppose evil spirits counteracting the Deity, and raising storms, for instance, to destroy his creatures. JOHNSON. "Why, Sir, if moral evil be consistent with the government of the Deity, why may not physical evil be also consistent with it? It is not more strange that there should be evil spirits than evil men: evil unembodied spirits, than evil embodied spirits. And as to storms, we know there are such things; and it is no worse that evil spirits raise them than that they rise." CROSBIE. "But it is not credible that witches should have effected what they Lord Stowell remembered with pleasure the elegance and extent or Sir Adolphus Oughton's literature, and the suavity of his manners.Oroker. are said in stories to have done." JOHNSON. "Sir, I am not defending their credibility. I am only saying that your arguments are not good, and will not overturn the belief of witchcraft.-(Dr. Fergusson said to me aside, He is right.')-And then, Sir, you have all mankind, rude and civilized, agreeing in the belief of the agency of preternatural powers. You must take evidence; you must consider that wise and great men have condemned witches to die." CROSBIE. "But an act of parliament put an end to witchcraft." JOHNSON. "No, Sir, witchcraft had ceased; and, therefore, an act of parliament was passed to prevent persecution for what was not witchcraft. Why it ceased we cannot tell, as we cannot tell the reason of many other things." Dr. Cullen, to keep up the gratification of mysterious disquisition, with the grave address for which he is remarkable in his companionable as in his professional hours, talked in a very entertaining manner, of people walking and conversing in their sleep. I am very sorry I have no note of this. We talked of the ouranoutang, and of Lord Monboddo's thinking that he might be taught to speak. Dr. Johnson treated this with ridicule. Mr. Crosbie said that Lord Monboddo believed the existence of every thing possible; in short, that all which is in posse might be found in esse. JOHNSON. "But, Sir, it is as possible that the ouran-outang does not speak, as that he speaks. However, I shall not contest the point. I should have thought it not possible to find a Monboddo; yet he exists." I again mentioned the stage. JOHNSON. appearance of a player, with whom I have drunk tea, counteracts the imagination that he is the character he represents. Nay, you know, nobody imagines that he is the character he represents. They say, 'See Garrick! how he looks to-night! See how he'll clutch the dagger!' That is the buzz of the theatre." 66 The Tuesday, Aug. 17.-Sir William Forbes came to breakfast, and brought with him Dr. Blacklock, whom he introduced to Dr. Johnson, who received him with a most humane complacency; "Dear Dr. Blacklock, I am glad to see you!" Blacklock seemed to be much surprised when Dr. Johnson said, "it was easier to him to write poetry than to compose his Dictionary. His mind was less on the stretch in doing the one than the other. Besides, composing a dictionary requires books and a desk: you can make a poem walking in the fields, or lying in bed." Dr. Blacklock spoke of scepticism in morals and religion with apparent uneasiness, as if he wished for more certainty.? Dr. Johnson, who had thought it all over, and whose vigorous understanding was fortified by much experience, thus encouraged the blind bard to apply to higher speculations what we all willingly submit to in common life: in short, he gave him more familiarly the able and fair reasoning of Butler's Analogy: "Why, Sir, the greatest concern we have in this world, the choice of our profession, must be determined without demonstrative reasoning. Human life is not yet so well known, as that we can have it and take the case of a man who is ill. I call two physicians: they differ in opinion. I am not to lie down, and die between them: I must do something." The conversation then turned on atheism; on that horrible book, Système de la Nature;" and on the supposition of an eternal necessity without design, without a governing mind. JOHNSON. "If it were so, why has it ceased? Why don't we see men thus produced around us now? Why, at least, does it not keep pace, in some measure, with the progress of time? If it stops because there is now no need of it, then it is plain there is, and ever has been, an all-powerful intelligence. But stay! (said he, with one of his satiric laughs). Ha ha ha! I shall suppose Scotchmen made necessarily, and Englishmen by choice.' 66 At dinner this day we had Sir Alexander Dick, whose amiable character and ingenious and cultivated mind are so generally known (he was then on the verge of seventy, and is now (1785) eighty-one, with his faculties entire, his heart warm, and his temper gay); Sir David Dalrymple, 4 There is hardly any operation of the intellect which requires nicer and deeper consideration than definition. A thousand men may write verses for one who has the power of defining and discriminating the exact meaning of words and the principles of grammatical arrangement. -Croker. 2 See his Letter on this subject in the Appendix. 3 Written by the Baron d'Holbach, and published in the year 1770 under the pseudonym of Mirabaud.-Editor." Sir A. Dick was born in 1703; died Nov. 10, 1785.-Wright. 66 Lord Hailes; Mr. Maclaurin, advocate; Dr. Gregory, who now, worthily fills his father's medical chair; and my uncle, Dr. Boswell. This was one of Dr. Johnson's best days. He was quite in his element. All was literature and taste, without any interruption. Lord Hailes, who is one of the best philologists in Great Britain, who has written papers in the “ World," and a variety of other works in prose and in verse, both Latin and English, pleased him highly. He told him he had discovered the Life of Cheynel, in the "Student," to be his. JOHNSON. 'No one else knows it." Dr. Johnson had before this dictated to me a law-paper1 upon a question purely in the law of Scotland, concerning vicious intromission, that is to say, intermeddling with the effects of a deceased person, without a regular title; which formerly was understood to subject the intermeddler to payment of all the defunct's debts. The principle has of late been relaxed. Dr. Johnson's argument was for a renewal of its strictness. The paper was printed, with additions by me, and given into the court of session. Lord Hailes knew Dr. Johnson's part not to be mine, and pointed out exactly where it began and where it ended. Dr. Johnson said, "It is much now that his lordship can distinguish so." In Dr. Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes the following passage : "The teeming mother, anxious for her race, there is Yet Vane could tell what ills from beauty spring: Lord Hailes told me he was mistaken in the instances ne had given of unfortunate fair ones; for neither Vane nor Sedley had a title to that description. His lordship has since been so obliging as to send me a note of this, for the communication of which I am sure my readers will thank me. "The lines in the tenth Satire of Juvenal, according to my alteration, should run thus:— 1.See Life, vol. ii., pp. 187-191. TO THE HEBRIDES. "Yet Shore1 could tell 2 And Valière cursed "The first was a penitent by compulsion, the second by sentiment; though the truth is, Mademoiselle de la Valière threw herself (but still from sentiment) in the king's way. "Our friend chose Vane who was far from being well-looked; and Sedley, who was so ugly that Charles II. said his brother had her by way of penance." 5 Mr. Maclaurin's learning and talents enabled him to do his part very well in Dr. Johnson's company. He produced two epitaphs upon his father, the celebrated mathematician. 1 Mistress of Edward IV. 3 Catherine Sedley, created Countess of Dorchester for life. Her 2 Mistress of Louis XIV. father, Sir Charles, resenting the seduction of his daughter, joined in the Whig measures of the Revolution, and excused his revolt from James under an ironical profession of gratitude. he, "having done me the unlooked-for honour of making my daughter "His Majesty," said a countess, I cannot do less in return than endeavour to make his daughter a queen."-Croker. Lord Hailes was hypercritical. Vane was handsome, or, what is more to our purpose, appeared so to her royal lover; and Sedley, whatever others may have thought of her, had the "charms which pleased a king." proposed substitution of a fabulous (or at least apocryphal) beauty like So that Johnson's illustrations are morally just. His lordship's Jane Shore, whose story, even if true, was obsolete; or that of a foreigner, like Mlle. de la Valière, little known and less cared for amongst us, is not only tasteless but inaccurate; for Mlle. de la Valière's beauty was quite as much questioned by her contemporaries as Miss Sedley's. Bussy Rabutin was exiled for sneering at Louis's admiration of her mouth, which he calls un bec amoureux, Qui d'une oreille à l'autre va." And Madame du Plessis Bellièvre writes to Fouquet, "Mlle. de la Val- down the name into Valière, his ear might have told him that it did not fit the metre.-Croker. 5 Mr. Maclaurin, advocate, son of the great mathematician, and afterindifferent English poems; but was a good Latin scholar, and a man of wit and accomplishment. His quotations from the classics were particularly apposite. In the famous case of Knight, which determined the right of a slave to freedom if he landed in Scotland, Maclaurin pleaded the cause of the negro. The counsel opposite was the celebrated Wight, an excellent lawyer, but of a very homely appearance, with heavy V. D |