share;
And, each day’s bustling pageantry once past,
There, only there, our bliss is found at last.’ BOSWELL.
Three years earlier, when his wife was dying, he had written in one of the last Ramblers (No 203):—‘It is necessary to the completion of every good, that it be timely obtained; for whatever comes at the close of life will come too late to give much delight … What we acquire by bravery or science, by mental or corporal diligence, comes at last when we cannot communicate, and therefore cannot enjoy it.’ Chesterfield himself was in no happy state. Less than a month before he received Johnson’s letter he wrote (Works, iii. 308):—‘For these six months past, it seems as if all the complaints that ever attacked heads had joined to overpower mine. Continual noises, headache, giddiness, and impenetrable deafness; I could not stoop to write; and even reading, the only resource of the deaf, was painful to me.’ He wrote to his son a year earlier (Letters, iv. 43), ‘Reading, which was always a pleasure to me in the time even of my greatest dissipation, is now become my only refuge; and I fear I indulge it too much at the expense of my eyes. But what can I do? I must do something. I cannot bear absolute idleness; my ears grow every day more useless to me, my eyes consequently more necessary. I will not hoard them like a miser, but will rather risk the loss than not enjoy the use of them.’
[770] ‘The English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.’ Johnson’s Works v. 51.
[771] Upon comparing this copy with that which Dr. Johnson dictated to me from recollection, the variations are found to be so slight, that this must be added to the many other proofs which he gave of the wonderful extent and accuracy of his memory. To gratify the curious in composition, I have deposited both the copies in the British Museum. BOSWELL.
[772] Soon after Edwards’s Canons of Criticism came out, Johnson was dining at Tonson the Bookseller’s with Hayman the Painter and some more company. Hayman related to Sir Joshua Reynolds, that the conversation having turned upon Edwards’s book, the gentlemen praised it much, and Johnson allowed its merit. But when they went farther, and appeared to put that author upon a level with Warburton, ‘Nay, (said Johnson,) he has given him some smart hits to be sure; but there is no proportion between the two men; they must not be named together. A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.’ BOSWELL. Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare (Works, v. 141) wrote:—‘Dr. Warburton’s chief assailants are the authors of The Canons of Criticism, and of The Revisal of Shakespeare’s Text…. The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter and returns for more; the other bites like a viper…. When I think on one with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that “girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle;” when the other crosses my imagination, I remember the prodigy in Macbeth:
“A falcon tow’ring in his pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.”
Let me, however, do them justice. One is a wit and one a scholar.’
[773] To Johnson might be applied what he himself said of Dryden:—‘He appears to have known in its whole extent the dignity of his character, and to have set a very high value on his own powers and performances.’ Works, vii. 291.
[774] In the original Yet mark.
[775] In the original Toil.
[776] In his Dictionary he defined patron as ‘commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.’ This definition disappears in the Abridgement, but remains in the fourth edition.
[777] Chesterfield, when he read Johnson’s letter to Dodsley, was acting up to the advice that he had given his own son six years earlier (Letters, ii. 172):—‘When things of this kind [bons mots] happen to be said of you, the most prudent way is to seem not to suppose that they are meant at you, but to dissemble and conceal whatever degree of anger you may feel inwardly: and, should they be so plain, that you cannot be supposed ignorant of their meaning, so join in the laugh of the company against yourself; acknowledge the hit to be a fair one, and the jest a good one, and play off the whole thing in seeming good humour; but by no means reply in the same way; which only shows that you are hurt, and publishes the victory which you might have concealed.’
[778] See post, March 23, 1783, where Johnson said that ‘Lord Chesterfield was dignified, but he was insolent;’ and June 27, 1784, where he said that ‘his manner was exquisitely elegant.’
[779]
‘Whate’er of mongrel no one class admits,
A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.’
Pope’s Dunciad, iv. 90.
‘A true choice spirit we admit;
With wits a fool, with fools a wit.’
Churchill’s Duellist‘ Book iii.
‘The solemn fop, significant and budge;
A fool with judges, amongst fools a judge.’
Cowper’s Poems, Conversation, 1. 299.
According to Rebecca Warner (Original Letters, p. 204), Johnson telling Joseph Fowke about his refusal to dedicate his Dictionary to Chesterfield, said: ‘Sir, I found I must have gilded a rotten post.’
[780] That collection of letters cannot be vindicated from the serious charge of encouraging, in some passages, one of the vices most destructive to the good order and comfort of society, which his Lordship represents as mere fashionable gallantry; and, in others, of inculcating the base practice of dissimulation, and recommending, with disproportionate anxiety, a perpetual attention to external elegance of manners. But it must, at the same time, be allowed, that they contain many good precepts of conduct, and much genuine information upon life and manners, very happily expressed; and that there was considerable merit in paying so much attention to the improvement of one who was dependent upon his Lordship’s protection; it has, probably, been exceeded in no instance by the most exemplary parent; and though I can by no means approve of confounding the distinction between lawful and illicit offspring, which is, in effect, insulting the civil establishment of our country, to look no higher; I cannot help thinking it laudable to be kindly attentive to those, of whose existence we have, in any way, been the cause. Mr. Stanhope’s character has been unjustly represented as diametrically opposite to what Lord Chesterfield wished him to be. He has been called dull, gross, and awkward; but I knew him at Dresden, when he was Envoy to that court; and though he could not boast of the graces, he was, in truth, a sensible, civil, well-behaved man. BOSWELL. See post, March 28, 1775, under April, 29, 1776, and June 27, 1784.
[781] Chesterfield’s Letters, iii. 129.
[782] Now one of his Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State. BOSWELL. Afterwards Viscount Melville.
[783] Probably George, second Earl of Macclesfield, who was, in 1752, elected President of the Royal Society. CROKER. Horace Walpole (Letters, ii. 321) mentions him as ‘engaged to a party for finding out the longitude.’
[784] In another work (Dr. Johnson: His Friends and his Critics, p. 214), I have shewn that Lord Chesterfield’s ‘Respectable Hottentot’ was not Johnson. From the beginning of 1748 to the end of 1754 Chesterfield had no dealings of any kind with Johnson. At no time had there been the slightest intimacy between the great nobleman and the poor author. Chesterfield had never seen Johnson eat. The letter in which the character is drawn opens with the epigram:
Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare,
Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.
Chesterfield