ye vain boasters, to the Fleet repair
And ask, with blushes ask if Lloyd is there.’
Of the four men who thus enlivened Boswell, two were dead before the end of the following year. Churchill went first. When Lloyd heard of his death, ‘“I shall follow poor Charles,” was all he said, as he went to the bed from which he never rose again.’ Thornton lived three or four years longer, Forster’s Essays, ii 217, 270, 289. See also his Life of Goldsmith i. 264, for an account how ‘Lloyd invited Goldsmith to sup with some friends of Grub Street, and left him to pay the reckoning.’ Thornton, Lloyd, Colman, Cowper, and Joseph Hill, to whom Cowper’s famous Epistle was addressed, had at one time been members of the Nonsense Club. Southey’s Cowper, i. 37.
[1164] The author of the well-known sermons, see post, under Dec. 21, 1776.
[1165] See post, under Dec. 9, 1784.
[1166] See post, Feb. 7, 1775, under Dec. 24, 1783, and Boswell’s Hebrides, Nov. 10, 1773.
[1167] ‘Sir,’ he said to Reynolds, ‘a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it;’ post, under March 30, 1783.
[1168] ‘Or behind the screen’ some one might have added, ante, i. 163.
[1169] Wesley was told that a whole waggon-load of Methodists had been lately brought before a Justice of the Peace. When he asked what they were charged with, one replied, ‘Why they pretended to be better than other people, and besides they prayed from morning to night.’ Wesley’s Journal, i. 361. See also post, 1780, near the end of Mr. Langton’s Collection.
[1170] ‘The progress which the understanding makes through a book has’ he said, ‘more pain than pleasure in it;’ post, May 1, 1783.
[1171] Matthew, vi. 16.
[1172] Boswell, it is clear, in the early days of his acquaintance with Johnson often led the talk to this subject. See post, June 25, July 14, 21, and 28, 1763.
[1173] See post, April 7, 1778.
[1174] He finished his day, ‘however late it might be,’ by taking tea at Miss Williams’s lodgings; post, July 1, 1763.
[1175] See post, under Feb. 15, 1766, Feb. 1767, March 20, 1776, and Boswell’s Hebrides, Sept. 20, 1773, where Johnson says:—‘I have been trying to cure my laziness all my life, and could not do it.’ It was this kind of life that caused so much of the remorse which is seen in his Prayers and Meditations.
[1176] Horace Walpole writing on June 12, 1759 (Letters, iii. 231), says:—‘A war that reaches from Muscovy to Alsace, and from Madras to California, don’t produce an article half so long as Mr. Johnson’s riding three horses at once.’ I have a curious copper-plate showing Johnson standing on one, or two, and leading a third horse in full speed.’ It bears the date of November 1758. See post, April 3, 1778.
[1177] In the impudent Correspondence (pp. 63, 65) which Boswell and Andrew Erskine published this year, Boswell shows why he wished to enter the Guards. ‘My fondness for the Guards,’ he writes, ‘must appear very strange to you, who have a rooted antipathy at the glare of scarlet. But I must inform you, that there is a city called London, for which I have as violent an affection as the most romantic lover ever had for his mistress…. I am thinking of the brilliant scenes of happiness, which I shall enjoy as an officer of the guards. How I shall be acquainted with all the grandeur of a court, and all the elegance of dress and diversions; become a favourite of ministers of state, and the adoration of ladies of quality, beauty, and fortune! How many parties of pleasure shall I have in town! How many fine jaunts to the noble seats of dukes, lords, and members of parliament in the country! I am thinking of the perfect knowledge which I shall acquire of men and manners, of the intimacies which I shall have the honour to form with the learned and ingenious in every science, and of the many amusing literary anecdotes which I shall pick up,’ etc. Boswell, in his Hebrides (Aug. 18, 1773), says of himself:—‘His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father, a respectable Judge, had pressed him into the profession of the law.’
[1178] A row of tenements in the Strand, between Wych Street and Temple Bar, and ‘so called from the butchers’ shambles on the south side.’ (Strype, B. iv. p. 118.) Butcher Row was pulled down in 1813, and the present Pickett Street erected in its stead. P. CUNNINGHAM. In Humphry Clinker, in the letter of June 10, one of the poor authors is described as having been ‘reduced to a woollen night-cap and living upon sheep’s-trotters, up three pair of stairs backward in Butcher Row.’
[1179] Cibber was poet-laureate from 1730 to 1757. Horace Walpole describes him as ‘that good humoured and honest veteran, so unworthily aspersed by Pope, whose Memoirs, with one or two of his comedies, will secure his fame, in spite of all the abuse of his contemporaries.’ His successor Whitehead, Walpole calls ‘a man of a placid genius.’ Reign of George II, iii. 81. See ante, pp. 149, 185, and post, Oct. 19, 1769, May 15, 1776, and Sept. 21, 1777.
[1180] The following quotations show the difference of style in the two poets:—
COLLEY GIBBER.
‘When her pride, fierce in arms,
Would to Europe give law;
At her cost let her come,
To our cheer of huzza!
Not lightning with thunder more terrible darts,
Than the burst of huzza from our bold British hearts.’
Gent. Mag. xxv. 515.
WM. WHITEHEAD.
‘Ye guardian powers, to whose command,
At Nature’s birth, th’ Almighty mind
The delegated task assign’d
To watch o’er Albion’s favour’d land,
What time your hosts with choral lay,
Emerging from its kindred deep,
Applausive hail’d each verdant steep,
And white rock, glitt’ring to the new-born day!’
Ib. xxix. 32.
[1181] See ante, p. 167.
[1182] ‘Whitehead was for some while Garrick’s “reader” of new plays for Drury-lane.’ Forster’s Goldsmith, ii. 41. See post, April 25, 1778, note. The verses to Garrick are given in Chalmers’s English Poets, xvii. 222.
[1183] ‘In 1757 Gray published The Progress of Poetry and The Bard, two compositions at which the readers of poetry were at first content to gaze in mute amazement. Some that tried them confessed their inability to understand them…. Garrick wrote a few lines in their praise. Some hardy champions undertook to rescue them from neglect; and in a short time many were content to be shown beauties which they could not see.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 478. See post, March 28, and April 2, 1775, and 1780 in Mr. Langton’s Collection. Goldsmith, no doubt, attacked Gray among ‘the misguided innovators,’ of whom he said in his Life of Parnell:—‘They have adopted a language of their own, and call upon mankind for admiration. All those who do not understand them are silent, and those who make out their meaning are willing to praise to show they understand.’ Goldsmith’s Misc. Works, iv. 22.
[1184] Johnson, perhaps, refers to the anonymous critic quoted by Mason in his notes on this Ode, who says:—‘This abrupt execration plunges the reader into that sudden fearful perplexity which is designed to predominate through the whole.’ Mason’s Gray, ed. 1807, i. 96.
[1185] ‘Of the first stanza [of The Bard] the abrupt beginning has been celebrated; but technical beauties can give praise