He added it also to his Life of Pope.
[897] ‘This employment,’ wrote Murphy (Life, p. 88), ‘engrossed but little of Johnson’s time. He resigned himself to indolence, took no exercise, rose about two, and then received the visits of his friends. Authors long since forgotten waited on him as their oracle, and he gave responses in the chair of criticism. He listened to the complaints, the schemes, and the hopes and fears of a crowd of inferior writers, “who,” he said, in the words of Roger Ascham, “lived, men knew not how, and died obscure, men marked not when.” He believed, that he could give a better history of Grub Street than any man living. His house was filled with a succession of visitors till four or five in the evening. During the whole time he presided at his tea-table.’ In The Rambler, No. 145, Johnson takes the part of these inferior writers:—‘a race of beings equally obscure and equally indigent, who, because their usefulness is less obvious to vulgar apprehensions, live unrewarded and die unpitied, and who have been long exposed to insult without a defender, and to censure without an apologist.’
[898] In this essay (Works, vi. 129) Johnson describes Canada as a ‘region of desolate sterility,’ ‘a cold, uncomfortable, uninviting region, from which nothing but furs and fish were to be had.’
[899] The bill of 1756 that he considers passed through the Commons but was rejected by the Lords. It is curious as showing the comparative population of the different counties, Devonshire was to furnish 3200 men—twice as many as Lancashire. Essex, Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk were each to furnish 1920 men; Lancashire, Surrey, Sussex, and Wiltshire 1600: Durham and Bedfordshire 800. From the three Ridings of Yorkshire 4800 were to be raised. The men were to be exercised every Sunday before and after service. The Literary Magazine, p. 58.
[900] In this paper are found the forcible words, ‘The desperate remedy of desperate distress,’ which have been used since by orators. Ib. p. 121.
[901] Johnson considers here the war in America between the English and French, and shows a strong feeling for the natives who had been wronged by both nations. ‘Such is the contest that no honest man can heartily wish success to either party…. The American dispute between the French and us is only the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger.’ The French had this in their favour, that they had treated the natives better than we. ‘The favour of the Indians which they enjoy with very few exceptions among all the nations of the northern continent we ought to consider with other thoughts; this favour we might have enjoyed, if we had been careful to deserve it.’ Works, vi. 114, 122.
[902] These Memoirs end with the year 1745. Johnson had intended to continue them, for he writes:—‘We shall here suspend our narrative.’ Ib. vi. 474.
[903] See ante, p. 221.
[904] The sentence continues:—‘and produce heirs to the father’s habiliments.’ Ib. vi. 436. Another instance may be adduced of his Brownism in the following line:—‘The war continued in an equilibration by alternate losses and advantages.’ Ib 473.
[905] In a letter from the Secretary of the Tall Club in The Guardian, No. 108. ‘If the fair sex look upon us with an eye of favour, we shall make some attempts to lengthen out the human figure, and restore it to its ancient procerity.’
[906] See post, March 23, 1783.
[907] ‘As power is the constant and unavoidable consequence of learning, there is no reason to doubt that the time is approaching when the Americans shall in their turn have some influence on the affairs of mankind, for literature apparently gains ground among them. A library is established in Carolina and some great electrical discoveries were made at Philadelphia…The fear that the American colonies will break off their dependence on England I have always thought chimerical and vain … They must be dependent, and if they forsake us, or be forsaken by us, must fall into the hands of France.’ Literary Magazine, pp. 293, 299.
[908] Johnson, I have no doubt, wrote the Review of A True Account of Lisbon since the Earthquake, in which it is stated that the destruction was grossly exaggerated. After quoting the writer at length, he concludes:—‘Such then is the actual, real situation of that place which once was Lisbon, and has been since gazetically and pamphletically quite destroyed, consumed, annihilated! Now, upon comparing this simple narration of things and facts with the false and absurd accounts which have rather insulted and imposed upon us than informed us, who but must see the enormous disproportion?… Exaggeration and the absurdities ever faithfully attached to it are inseparable attitudes of the ignorant, the empty, and the affected. Hence those eloquent tropes so familiar in every conversation, monstrously pretty, vastly little; … hence your eminent shoemaker, farriers, and undertakers…. It is to the same muddy source we owe the many falsehoods and absurdities we have been pestered with concerning Lisbon. Thence your extravagantly sublime figures: Lisbon is no more; can be seen no more, etc., … with all the other prodigal effusions of bombast beyond that stretch of time or temper to enumerate. Ib. p. 22. See post, under March 30, 1778.
[909] In the original undigested.
[910] Johnson’s Works, vi. 113.
[911] In the spring of 1784, after the king had taken advantage of Fox’s India Bill to dismiss the Coalition Ministry. See post, March 28, 1784.
[912] In Ireland there was no act to limit the duration of parliament. One parliament sat through the whole reign of George II—thirty-three years. Dr. Lucas, a Dublin physician, in attacking other grievances, attacked also this. In 1749 he would have been elected member for Dublin, had he not, on a charge of seditious writings, been committed by the House of Commons to prison. He was to be confined, he was told, ‘in the common hall of the prison among the felons.’ He fled to England, which was all that the government wanted, and he practised as a physician in London. In 1761 he was restored to the liberties of the City of Dublin and was also elected one of its members. Hardy’s Lord Charlemont, i. 249, 299; and Gent. Mag., xx. 58 and xxxi. 236.
[913] Boswell himself falls into this ‘cant.’ See post, Sept. 23, 1777.
[914] Johnson’s Works, vi. II.
[915] Ib. p. 13. He vigorously attacks the style in which these ‘Memoirs’ are written. ‘Sometimes,’ he writes, ‘the reader is suddenly ravished with a sonorous sentence, of which, when the noise is past, the meaning does not long remain.’ Ib. p. 15.
[916] The author of Friendship in Death.
[917] In the _Lives of the Poets (Works, viii. 383) Johnson writes:—‘Dr Watts was one of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the graces of language. Whatever they had among them before, whether of learning or acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by coarseness and inelegance of style. He showed them that zeal and purity might be expressed and enforced by polished diction.’
[918] ‘Such he [Dr. Watts] was as every Christian Church would rejoice to have adopted.’ Ib. p. 380. See also post, July 7, 1777, and May 19, 1778.
[919] Johnson’s Works, vi. 79.
[920] Mr. Hanway would have had the support of Johnson’s father, who, as his son writes, ‘considered tea as very expensive, and discouraged my mother from keeping company with the neighbours, and from paying visits or receiving them. She lived to say, many years after, that if the time were to pass again, she would not comply with such unsocial injunctions.’ Account of Johnson’s Early Life, p. 18. The Methodists, ten years earlier than Hanway, had declared war on tea. ‘After talking largely with both the men and women Leaders,’ writes Wesley, ‘we agreed it would prevent great expense, as well of health as of time and of money, if the poorer people of our society could be persuaded to leave off drinking of tea.’ Wesley’s Journal, i. 526. Pepys, writing in 1660, says: ‘I did send for a cup of tee, (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.’ Pepys’ Diary, i. 137. Horace Walpole (Letters, i. 224) writing in 1743 says:—‘They have talked