Walpole wrote of him in Sept. 1765 (Letters, iv. 411):—‘He is a very extraordinary young man for variety of learning. He is rather too wise for his age, and too fond of showing it; but when he has seen more of the world, he will choose to know less.’ He died at Rome in the following year. Hume, on hearing the news, wrote to Adam Smith:—‘Were you and I together, dear Smith, we should shed tears at present for the death of poor Sir James Macdonald. We could not possibly have suffered a greater loss than in that valuable young man.’ J. H. Burton’s Hume, ii. 349. See Boswell’s Hebrides, Sept. 5, 1773.
[1323] Boswell says that Macdonald had for Johnson ‘a great terrour.’ (Boswelliana, p. 216.) Northcote (Life of Reynolds, i. 329) says:—‘It is a fact that a certain nobleman, an intimate friend of Reynolds, had strangely conceived in his mind such a formidable idea of all those persons who had gained great fame as literary characters, that I have heard Sir Joshua say, he verily believed he could no more have prevailed upon this noble person to dine at the same table with Johnson and Goldsmith than with two tigers.’ According to Mr. Seward (Biographiana, p. 600), Mrs. Cotterell having one day asked Dr. Johnson to introduce her to a celebrated writer, ‘Dearest madam,’ said he, ‘you had better let it alone; the best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.’ Mr. Seward refers to The Rambler, No. 14, where Johnson says that ‘there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an authour and his writings.’
[1324] See post, Jan. 19, 1775. In his Hebrides (p. i) Boswell writes:—‘When I was at Ferney, in 1764, I mentioned our design to Voltaire. He looked at me as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, “You do not insist on my accompanying you?” “No, Sir.” “Then I am very willing you should go.”’
[1325] ‘When he went through the streets he desired to have one to lead him by the hand. They asked his opinion of the high church. He answered that it was a large rock, yet there were some in St. Kilda much higher, but that these were the best caves he ever saw; for that was the idea which he conceived of the pillars and arches upon which the church stands.’ M. Martin’s Western Isles, p. 297. Mr. Croker compares the passage in The Spectator (No. 50), in which an Indian king is made to say of St. Paul’s:—‘It was probably at first an huge misshapen rock that grew upon the top of the hill, which the natives of the country (after having cut it into a kind of regular figure) bored and hollowed with incredible pains and industry.’
[1326] Boswell, writing to Temple the next day, slightly varies these words:—‘He said, “My dear Boswell, it would give me great pain to part with you, if I thought we were not to meet again.”’ Letters of Boswell, p. 34.
[1327] Gibbon (Misc. Works, i. 43) protests against ‘the trite and lavish praise of the happiness of our boyish years, which is echoed with so much affectation in the world. That happiness I have never known, that time I have never regretted. The poet may gaily describe the short hours of recreation; but he forgets the daily tedious labours of the school, which is approached each morning with anxious and reluctant steps.’ See ante, p. 44, and post, under Feb. 27, 1772.
[1328] About fame Gibbon felt much as Johnson did. ‘I am disgusted,’ he wrote (ib. 272), ‘with the affectation of men of letters, who complain that they have renounced a substance for a shadow, and that their fame (which sometimes is no insupportable weight) affords a poor compensation for envy, censure, and persecution. My own experience, at least, has taught me a very different lesson; twenty happy years have been animated by the labour of my History, and its success has given me a name, a rank, a character, in the world, to which I should not otherwise have been entitled.’
[1329] See ante, p. 432.
[1330] See ante, p. 332.
[1331] This opinion was given by him more at large at a subsequent period. See Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 3rd edit. p. 32 [Aug. 16]. BOSWELL. ‘That Swift was its author, though it be universally believed, was never owned by himself, nor very well proved by any evidence; but no other claimant can be produced, and he did not deny it when Archbishop Sharpe and the Duchess of Somerset, by showing it to the Queen, debarred him from a bishoprick.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 197. See also post, March 24, 1775. Stockdale records (Memoirs, ii. 61) that Johnson said ‘that if Swift really was the author of The Tale of the Tub, as the best of his other performances were of a very inferior merit, he should have hanged himself after he had written it.’ Scott (Life of Swift, ed. 1834, p. 77) says:—‘Mrs. Whiteway observed the Dean, in the latter years of his life [in 1735], looking over the Tale, when suddenly closing the book he muttered, in an unconscious soliloquy, “Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!” She begged it of him, who made some excuse at the moment; but on her birthday he presented her with it inscribed, “From her affectionate cousin.” On observing the inscription, she ventured to say, “I wish, Sir, you had said the gift of the author!” The Dean bowed, smiled good-humouredly, and answered, “No, I thank you,” in a very significant manner.’ There is this to be said of Johnson’s incredulity about the Tale of a Tub, that the History of John Bull and the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, though both by Arbuthnot, were commonly assigned to Swift and are printed in his Works.
[1332] ‘Thomson thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet;—the eye that distinguishes in everything presented to its view whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 377. See post, ii. 63, and April 11, 1776.
[1333] Burke seems to be meant. See post, April 25, 1778, and Boswell’s Hebrides, Aug. 15, and Sept. 15, 1773.—It is strange however that, while in these three places Boswell mentions Burke’s name, he should leave a blank here. In Boswelliana, p. 328, Boswell records:—‘Langton said Burke hammered his wit upon an anvil, and the iron was cold. There were no sparks flashing and flying all about.’
[1334] In Boswelliana (p. 214) this anecdote is thus given:—‘Boswell was talking to Mr. Samuel Johnson of Mr. Sheridan’s enthusiasm for the advancement of eloquence. “Sir,” said Mr. Johnson, “it won’t do. He cannot carry through his scheme. He is like a man attempting to stride the English Channel. Sir, the cause bears no proportion to the effect. It is setting up a candle at Whitechapel to give light at Westminster.”’ See also ante, p. 385, and post. Oct. 16, 1969, April 18 and May 17, 1783.
[1335] Most likely Boswell himself. See ante, p. 410.
[1336] ‘Let a Frenchman talk twice with a minister of state, he desires no more to furnish out a volume.’ Swift’s Works, ed. 1803, xvi. 197. Lord Chesterfield wrote from Paris in 1741:—‘They [the Parisians] despise us, and with reason, for our ill-breeding; on the other hand, we despite them for their want of learning, and we are in the right of it.’ Supplement to Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 49. See Boswell’s Hebrides, Oct. 14, 1773.
[1337] ‘Dr. Johnson said that he had been told by an acquaintance of Sir Isaac Newton, that in early life he started as a clamorous infidel.’ Seward’s Anecdotes, ii. 324. In Brewster’s Life of Newton I find no mention of early infidelity. On the contrary, Newton had been described as one who ‘had been a searcher of the Scriptures from his youth’ (ii. 314). Brewster says that ‘some foreign writers have endeavoured to shew that his theological writings were composed at a late period of life, when his mind was in its dotage.’ It was not so, however. Ib. p. 315.
[1338] I fully intended to have followed advice of such weight; but having staid much longer both in Germany and Italy than I proposed to do, and having also visited Corsica, I found that I had exceeded the time allowed me by my father, and hastened to France in my way homewards. BOSWELL. See ante, p. 410.
[1339]
‘Has heaven reserved, in pity to the poor,