this situation with regard to many of my acquaintance whom I have honoured and respected, without being able to love.’ He then instances the case of the man whom he describes as a respectable Hottentot. It is clear that he is writing of a man whom he knows well and who has some claim upon his affection. Twice he says that it is impossible to love him. The date of this letter is Feb. 28, 1751, more than three years after Johnson had for the last time waited in Chesterfield’s outward rooms. Moreover the same man is described in three other letters (Sept. 22, 1749; Nov. 1749; and May 27, 1753), and described as one with whom Chesterfield lived on terms of intimacy. In the two former of these letters he is called Mr. L. Lyttelton did not become Sir George Lyttelton till Sept. 14, 1751. He was raised to the peerage in 1757. Horace Walpole (Reign of George III, i. 256) says of him:—‘His ignorance of mankind, want of judgment, with strange absence and awkwardness, involved him in mistakes and ridicule.’ Had Chesterfield’s letter been published when it was written, no one in all likelihood would have so much as dreamt that Johnson was aimed at. But it did not come before the world till twenty-three years later, when Johnson’s quarrel with Chesterfield was known to every one, when Johnson himself was at the very head of the literary world, and when his peculiarities had become a matter of general interest.
[785] About four years after this time Gibbon, on his return to England, became intimate with Mr. and Mrs. Mallet. He thus wrote of them:—‘The most useful friends of my father were the Mallets; they received me with civility and kindness at first on his account, and afterwards on my own; and (if I may use Lord Chesterfield’s words) I was soon domesticated in their house. Mr. Mallet, a name among the English poets, is praised by an unforgiving enemy for the ease and elegance of his conversation, and his wife was not destitute of wit or learning.’ Gibbon’s Misc. Works, i 115. The ‘unforgiving enemy’ was Johnson, who wrote (Works, viii. 468):—‘His conversation was elegant and easy. The rest of his character may, without injury to his memory, sink into silence.’ Johnson once said:—‘I have seldom met with a man whose colloquial ability exceeded that of Mallet.’ Johnson’s Works, 1787, xi. 214. See post, March 27, 1772, and April 28, 1783; and Boswell’s Hebrides, Sept. 10, 1773.
[786] Johnson had never read Bolingbroke’s Philosophy. ‘I have never read Bolingbroke’s impiety,’ he said (post, under March 1, 1758). In the memorable sentence that he, notwithstanding, pronounced upon the author, he exposed himself to the retort which he had recorded in his Life of Boerhaave (Works, vi. 277). ‘As Boerhaave was sitting in a common boat, there arose a conversation among the passengers upon the impious and pernicious doctrine of Spinosa, which, as they all agreed, tends to the utter overthrow of all religion. Boerhaave sat and attended silently to this discourse for some time, till one of the company … instead of confuting the positions of Spinosa by argument began to give a loose to contumelious language and virulent invectives, which Boerhaave was so little pleased with, that at last he could not forbear asking him, whether he had ever read the author he declaimed against.’
[787] Lord Shelburne said that ‘Bolingbroke was both a political and personal coward.’ Fitzmaurice’s Shelburne, i. 29.
[788] It was in the summer of this year that Murphy became acquainted with Johnson. (See post, 1760.) ‘The first striking sentence that he heard from him was in a few days after the publication of Lord Bolingbroke’s posthumous works. Mr. Garrick asked him, “if he had seen them.” “Yes, I have seen them.” “What do you think of them?” “Think of them!” He made a long pause, and then replied: “Think of them! a scoundrel and a coward! A scoundrel who spent his life in charging a gun against Christianity; and a coward, who was afraid of hearing the report of his own gun; but left half-a-crown to a hungry Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death!” His mind, at this time strained and over laboured by constant exertion, called for an interval of repose and indolence. But indolence was the time of danger; it was then that his spirits, not employed abroad, turned with inward hostility against himself.’ Murphy’s Johnson, p. 79, and Piozzi’s Anec., p. 235. Adam Smith, perhaps, had this saying of Johnson’s in mind, when in 1776 he refused the request of the dying Hume to edit after his death his Dialogues on Natural Religion. Hume wrote back:—‘I think your scruples groundless. Was Mallet anywise hurt by his publication of Lord Bolingbroke? He received an office afterwards from the present King and Lord Bute, the most prudish man in the world.’ Smith did not yield. J. H. Burton’s Hume, ii. 491.
[789] According to Horace Walpole (Letters, ii. 374), Pelham died of a surfeit. As Johnson says (Works, viii. 310):—‘The death of great men is not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives. The death of Pope was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampreys.’ Fielding in The Voyage to Lisbon (Works, x. 201) records:—‘I was at the worst on that memorable day when the public lost Mr. Pelham. From that day I began slowly, as it were, to draw my feet out of the grave.’ ‘“I shall now have no more peace,” the King said with a sigh; being told of his Minister’s death.’ Walpole’s George II, i. 378.
[790] ‘Thomas Warton, the younger brother of Dr. Warton, was a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He was Poetry Professor from 1758 to 1768. Mant’s Warton, i. xliv. In 1785 he was made Poet Laureate. Ib. lxxxiii. Mr. Mant, telling of an estrangement between Johnson and the Wartons, says that he had heard ‘on unquestionable authority that Johnson had lamented, with tears in his eyes, that the Wartons had not called on him for the last four years; and that he has been known to declare that Tom Warton was the only man of genius whom he knew without a heart.’ Ib. xxxix.
[791] ‘Observations on Spenser’s Fairy Queen, the first edition of which was now just published.’ WARTON.
[792] ‘Hughes published an edition of Spenser.’ WARTON. See Johnson’s Works, vii.476.
[793] ‘His Dictionary.’ WARTON.
[794] ‘He came to Oxford within a fortnight, and stayed about five weeks. He lodged at a house called Kettel hall, near Trinity College. But during this visit at Oxford, he collected nothing in the libraries for his Dictionary.’ WARTON.
[795] Pitt this year described, in the House of Commons, a visit that he had paid to Oxford the summer before. He and his friends ‘were at the window of the Angel Inn; a lady was desired to sing God save great George our King. The chorus was re-echoed by a set of young lads drinking at a college over the way [Queen’s], but with additions of rank treason.’ Walpole’s George II, i. 413.
[796] A Fellow of Pembroke College, of Johnson’s time, described the college servants as in ‘the state of servitude the most miserable that can be conceived amongst so many masters.’ He says that ‘the kicks and cuffs and bruises they submit to entitle them, when those who were displeased relent,’ to the compensation that is afforded by draughts of ale. ‘There is not a college servant, but if he have learnt to suffer, and to be officious, and be inclined to tipple, may forget his cares in a gallon or two of ale every day of his life.’ Dr. Johnson:—His Friends, &c., p. 45.
[797] It was against the Butler that Johnson, in his college days, had written an epigram:—
‘Quid mirum Maro quod digne
canit arma virumque,
Quid quod putidulum nostra
Camoena sonat?
Limosum nobis Promus dat callidus
haustum;
Virgilio vires uva Falerna dedit.
Carmina vis nostri scribant
meliora Poetae?
Ingenium jubeas purior haustus
alat.’
[798] Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, 1. 38.
[799] Johnson or Warton misquoted the line. It stands:—‘Mittit aromaticas vallis Saronica nubes.’ Husbands’s Miscellany, p. 112.
[800] De Quincey (Works, xiii. 162), after saying that Johnson did not understand Latin