Bolingbroke, in a fit of useless fury, resolved to blast his memory, and employed Mallet (1749) as the executioner of his vengeance. Mallet had not virtue, or had not spirit, to refuse the office; and was rewarded not long after with the legacy of Lord Bolingbroke’s works.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 467. See ante, p. 268, and Walpole’s Letters, ii. 159.
[983] A View of Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophy in Four Letters to a Friend, 1754-5.
[984] A paper under this name had been started seven years earlier. See Carter and Talbot Corres., ii. 33.
[985] In the two years in which Johnson wrote for this paper it saw many changes. The first Idler appeared in No. 2 of the Universal Chronicle or Weekly Gazette, which was published not by Newbery, but by J. Payne. On April 29, this paper took the title of Payne’s Universal Chronicle, etc. On Jan. 6, 1759, it resumed the old title and was published by R. Stevens. On Jan. 5, 1760, the title was changed to The Universal Chronicle and Westminster Journal, and it was published by W. Faden and R. Stevens. On March 15, 1760, it was published by R. Stevens alone. The paper consisted of eight pages. The Idler, which varied in length, came first, and was printed in larger characters, much like a leading article. The changes in title and ownership seem to show that in spite of Johnson’s contributions it was not a successful publication.
[986] ‘Those papers may be considered as a kind of syllabus of all Reynolds’s future discourses, and certainly occasioned him some thinking in their composition. I have heard him say, that Johnson required them from him on a sudden emergency, and on that account, he sat up the whole night to complete them in time; and by it he was so much disordered, that it produced a vertigo in his head.’ Northcote’s Reynolds, i. 89, Reynolds must have spoken of only one paper; as the three, appearing as they did on Sept. 29, Oct. 20, and Nov. 10, could not have been required at one time.
[987] ‘To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavours with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.’ The Idler, No. 17.
[988] Prayers and Meditations, p. 30 [36], BOSWELL.
[989] In July, 1759.
[990] This number was published a few days after his mother’s death. It is in the form of a letter, which is thus introduced:-‘The following letter relates to an affliction perhaps not necessary to be imparted to the publick; but I could not persuade myself to suppress it, because I think I know the sentiments to be sincere, and I feel no disposition to provide for this day any other entertainment.’
[991] In the table of contents the title of No. 58 is, ‘Expectations of pleasure frustrated.’ In the original edition of The Idler no titles are given. In this paper he shews that ‘nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.’
[992] In this paper he begins by considering, ‘why the only thinking being of this globe is doomed to think merely to be wretched, and to pass his time from youth to age in fearing or in suffering calamities.’ He ends by asserting that ‘of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greater part.’
[993] ‘There are few things,’ he writes, ‘not purely evil, of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, this is the last…. The secret horrour of the last is inseparable from a thinking being, whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful.’
[994] ‘I asked him one day, why the Idlers were published without mottoes. He replied, that it was forborne the better to conceal himself, and escape discovery. “But let us think of some now,” said he, “for the next edition. We can fit the two volumnes in two hours, can’t we?” Accordingly he recollected, and I wrote down these following (nine mottoes) till come friend coming in, in about five minutes, put an end to our further progress on the subject.’ Piossi Letters, ii. 388.
[995] See post, July 14 and 26, 1763, April 14, 1775, and Aug. 2, 1784, note for instances in which Johnson ridicules the notion that weather and seasons have any necessary effect on man; also April 17, 1778. In the Life of Milton (Works. vii. 102), he writes:—‘this dependence of the soul upon the seasons, those temporary and periodical ebbs and flows of intellect, may, I suppose, justly be derided as the fumes of vain imagination. Sapiens dominabitur astro. The author that thinks himself weather-bound will find, with a little help from hellebore, that he is only idle or exhausted. But while this notion has possession of the head, it produces the inability with it supposes. Our powers owe much of their energy to our hopes; possunt quin posse vidertur.’ Boswell records, in his Hebrides (Aug. 16, 1773), that when ‘somebody talked of happy moments for composition,’ Johnson said:—‘Nay, a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.’ Reynolds, who Alas! avowed how much he had learnt from Johnson (ante, p. 245), says much the same in his Seventh Discourse: ‘But when, in plain prose, we gravely talk of courting the Muse in shady bowers; waiting the call and inspiration of Genius … of attending to times and seasons when the imagination shoots with the greatest vigour, whether at the summer solstice or the vernal equinox … when we talk such language or entertain such sentiments as these, we generally rest contented with mere words, or at best entertain notions not only groundless but pernicious.’ Reynolds’s Works, i. 150. On the other hand, in 1773 Johnson recorded:—‘Between Easter and Whitsuntide, having always considered that time as propitious to study, I attempted to learn the Low-Dutch language.’ Post, under May 9, 1773. In The Rambler, No. 80, he says:—‘To the men of study and imagination the winter is generally the chief time of labour. Gloom and silence produce composure of mind and concentration of ideas.’ In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, written in 1775, he says:—‘Most men have their bright and their Cloudy days, at least they have days when they put their powers into act, and days when they suffer them to repose.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 265. In 1781 he wrote:—‘I thought myself above assistance or obstruction from the seasons; but find the autumnal blast sharp and nipping, and the fading world an uncomfortable prospect.’ Ib. ii. 220. Again, in the last year of his life he wrote:—‘The: weather, you know, has not been balmy. I am now reduced to think, and am at least content to talk, of the weather. Pride must have a fall.’ Post, Aug. 2, 1784.
[996] Addison’s Cato, act i. sc. 4.
[997] Johnson, reviewing the Duchess of Marlborough’s attack on Queen Mary, says (Works, vi. 8):—‘This is a character so different from all those that have been hitherto given of this celebrated princess, that the reader stands in suspense, till he considers that … it has hitherto had this great advantage, that it has only been compared with those of kings.’
[998] Johnson had explained how it comes to pass that Englishmen talk so commonly of the weather. He continues:—‘Such is the reason of our practice; and who shall treat it with contempt? Surely not the attendant on a court, whose business is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself, and whose vanity is to recount the names of men, who might drop into nothing, and leave no vacuity…. The weather is a nobler and more interesting subject; it is the present state of the skies and of the earth, on which plenty and famine are suspended, on which millions depend for the necessaries of life.’ ‘Garrick complained that when he went to read before the court, not a look or a murmur testified approbation; there was a profound stillness—every one only watched to see what the king thought.’ Hazlitt’s Conversations of Northcote, p. 262.
[999] The Idler, No. 90. See post, April 3, 1773, where he declaims against action in public speaking.
[1000] He now and then repeats himself. Thus, in The Idler, No. 37, he moralises on the story, how Socrates, passing through the fair at Athens, cried out:—‘How many things are here which I do not need!’ though he had already moralised on it in the Adventurer, Nos. 67, 119.
[1001] No. 34.
[1002] Poems on Several Occasions, by Thomas Blacklock, p. 179. See post, Aug. 5, 1763, and Boswell’s Hebrides, Aug. 17, 1773.
[1003] ‘Among the papers of Newbery,