to go and hiss it, because she had attacked Shakspeare in her book called Shakspeare Illustrated.' JOHNSON: And did not you tell him that he was a rascal?' GOLDSMITH: 'No, Sir, I did not. Perhaps he did not mean what he said.' JOHNSON: Nay, Sir, if he lied, it is a different thing.' Colman slily said, (but it is believed Dr. Johnson did not hear him,) Then the proper expression should have been,-Sir, it you don't lie, you are a rascal.'

"His affection for Topham Beauclerk was so great, that when Beauclerk was labouring under that severe illness which at last occasioned his death, Johnson said, (with a voice faltering with emotion,) 'Sir, I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk.""

"One night at the CLUB he produced a translation of an epitaph which Lord Elibank had written in English, for his Lady, and requested of Johnson to turn it into Latin for nim. Having read Domina de North et Gray, he said to Dyer,' 'You see, Sir, what barbarism we are compelled to make use of, when modern titles are to be specifically mentioned in Latin inscriptions.' When he had read it once aloud, and there had been a general approbation expressed by the company, he addressed himself to Mr. Dyer in particular, and said, 'Sir, I beg to have your judgment, for I know your nicety.' Dyer then very properly desired to read it over again; which having done, he pointed out an incongruity in one of the sentences. Johnson immediately assented to the observation, and said, 'Sir, this is owing to an alteration of a part of the sentence, from the form in which I had first written it; and I believe, Sir, you may have remarked, that the making a partial change, without a due regard to the general structure of the sentence, is a very frequent cause of error in composition.'

"Johnson was well acquainted with Mr. Dossie, author of a treatise on Agriculture; and said of him, 'Sir, of the objects which the Society of Arts have chiefly in view, the chemical effects of bodies operating upon other bodies, he knows more than almost any man.' Johnson, in order to give Mr. Dossie his vote to be a member of this Society, paid up an arrear which had run on for two years. On this occasion he mentioned a circumstance, as characteristic of the Scotch. 'One of that nation,' said he, who had been a candidate, against whom I had voted, came up to me with a civil salutation. Now, Sir, this is their way. An Englishman would have stomached it, and been sulky, and never have taken farther notice of you; but a Scotchman, Sir, though you vote nineteen times against him, will accost you with equal complaisance after each time, and the twentieth time, Sir, he will get your vote.'

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Talking on the subject of toleration, one day when some friends were with him in his study, he made his usual remark, that the Stata

I See vol. ii. p. 18.-MALONE.

has a right to regulate the religion of the people, who are the children of the State. A clergyman having readily acquiesced in this, Johnson, who loved discussion, observed, But, Sir, you must go round to other states than our own. You do not know what a Brahmin has to say for himself. In short, Sir, I have got no farther than this: every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.'

"A man, he observed, should begin to write soon: for, if he waits till his judgment is matured, his inability, through want of practice to express his conceptions, will make the disproportion so great between what he sees and what he can attain, that he will probably be discouraged from writing at all. As a proof of the justness of this remark, we may instance what is related of the great Lord Granville; that after he had written his letter, giving an account of the battle of Dettingen, he said, 'Here is a letter, expressed in terms not good enough for a tallow-chandler to have used.

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‘Talking of a court-martial that was sitting upon a very momentous public occasion, he expressed much doubt of an enlightened decision; and said, that perhaps there was not a member of it who, in the whole course of his life, had ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities."

"Goldsmith one day brought to the CLUB a printed Ode, which he, with others, had been hearing read by its author in a public room, at the rate of five shillings each for admission. One of the company having read it aloud, Dr. Johnson said, Bolder words and more timorous meaning, I think never were brought together.'

"Talking of Gray's Odes, he said, They are forced plants, raised in a hotbed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all.' A gentleman present, who had been running down Ode-writing in general, as a bad species of poetry, unluckily said, 'Had they been literally cucumbers, they had been better things than Odes.'- Yes, Sir,' said Johnson, ' for a hog.'

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His distinction of the different degrees of attainment of learning was thus marked upon two occasions. Of Queen Elizabeth he said, 'She had learning enough to have given dignity to a bishop;' and of Mr. Thomas Davies he said, Sir, Davies has learning enough to give credit to a clergyman.'

"He used to quote, with great warmth, the saying of Aristotle recorded by Diogenes Laertius; 'that there was the same difference between one learned and unlearned, as between the living and the dead.””

1 Here Lord Macartney remarks, A Brahmin or any cast of the Hindoos will neither admit you to be of their religion, nor be converted to yours:-a thing which struck the Portuguese with the greatest astonishment, when they first discovered the East Indies."-BOSWELL.

2 John, the first Earl Granville, who died January 2, 1763.-MALONE.

"It is very remarkable, that he retained in his memory very slight and trivial as well as important things. As an instance of this, it seems that an inferior domestic of the Duke of Leeds had attempted to celebrate his grace's marriage in such homely rhymes as he could make : and this curious composition having been sung to Dr. Johnson, he got it by heart, and used to repeat it in a very pleasant manner. Two of the stanzas were these :

To hear a man, of the weight and dignity of Johnson, repeating such humble attempts at poetry, had a very amusing effect. He, however, seriously observed of the last stanza repeated by him, that it nearly comprised all the advantages that wealth can give."

"An eminent foreigner, when he was shown the British Museum, was very troublesome with many absurd inquiries. Now there, Sir,' said he, 'is the difference between an Englishman and a Frenchman.' A Frenchman must be always talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content to say nothing, when he has nothing to say.'

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797

One

'His unjust contempt for foreigners was, indeed, extreme. evening, at Old Slaughter's coffee-house, when a number of them were talking loud about little matters, he said, 'Does not this confirm old Meynell's observation-For any thing I see, foreigners are fools!'”

1 The correspondent of "The Gentleman's Magazine' who subscribes himself SCIOLUS, furnishes the following supplement :

"A lady of my acquaintance remembers to have heard her uncle sing those homely stanzas more than forty-five years ago. He repeated the second thus.

'She shall breed young lords and ladies fair,

And ride abroad in a coach and three pair,

And the best, &c.

And have a house,' &c.

And remembered a third which seems to have been the introductory one, and is believed to have been the only remaining one:

'When the Duke of Leeds shall have made his choice

Of a charming young lady that's beautiful and wise,

She'll be the happiest young gentlewoman under the skies,

As long as the sun and moon shall rise,

And how happy shall,'" &c.

It is with pleasure I add that this stanza could never be more truly applied than at this present time [1792.]-Boswell.

"He said, that once, when he had a violent toothache, a Frenchman accosted him thus: Ah, Monsieur, vous étudiez trop.''

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DR. PARR.

'Having spent an evening at Mr. Langton's with the Reverend Dr. Parr,1 he was much pleased with the conversation of that learned gentleman; and, after he was gone, said to Mr. Langton, Sir, I am obliged to you for having asked me this evening. Parr is a fair man. I do not know when I have had an occasion of such free controversy. It is remarkable how much of a man's life may pass without meeting with any instance of this kind of open discussion.

"We may fairly institute a criticism between Shakspeare and Corneille, as they both had, though in a different degree, the lights of

1 Dr. Samuel Parr was one of the most learned and accomplished scholars of the age. He was selected as the writer of the Latin Epitaph recorded on Johnson's monument in St. Paul's Cathedral. In 1778, he was appointed master of the grammar school at Norwich, at the recommendation of Dr. Johnson; and in 1802 Sir Francis Burdett gave him the rector, of Graffham, in the county of Huntingdon. Soon after his death, which took place in 1825, at the age of 79, his Memoirs were published in 2 vols. 8vo., and subsequently a collection of his numerous works in 8 vols.-ED.

a latter age. It is not so just between the Greek dramatic writers and Shakspeare. It may be replied to what is said by one of the remarkers on Shakspeare, that though Darius's shade had prescience, it does not necessarily follow that he had all past particulars revealed to him.'"

"Spanish plays, being wildly and improbably farcical, would please children here, as children are entertained with stories full of prodigies; their experience not being sufficient to cause them to be so readily startled at deviations from the natural course of life. The machinery of the Pagans is uninteresting to us. When a goddess appears in Homer or Virgil, we grow weary; still more so in the Grecian tragedies, as in that kind of composition a nearer approach to Nature is intended. Yet there are good reasons for reading romances; as- -the fertility of invention, the beauty of style and expression, the curiosity of seeing with what kind of performances the age and country in which they were written was delighted: for it is to be apprehended, that at the time when very wild improbable tales were well received, the people were in a barbarous state, and so on the footing of children, as has been explained."

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'It is evident enough that no one who writes now can use the Pagan deities and mythology; the only machinery, therefore, seems that of ministering spirits, the ghosts of the departed, witches and fairies, though these latter, as the vulgar superstition concerning them (which, while in its force, infected at least the imagination of those that had more advantage in education, though their reason set them free from it), is every day wearing out, seem likely to be of little farther assistance in the machinery of poetry. As I recollect, Hammond introduces a hag or witch into one of his love elegies, where the effect is unmeaning and disgusting.'

"The man who uses his talent of ridicule in creating or grossly exaggerating the instances he gives, who imputes absurdities that did not happen, or when a man was a little ridiculous, describes him as having been very much so, abuses his talents greatly. The great use of delineating absurdities is, that we may know how far human folly can go; the account, therefore, ought of absolute necessity to be faithful. A certain character (naming the person) as to the general cast of it, is well described by Garrick, but a great deal of the phraseology he uses in it, is quite his own, particularly in the proverbial comparisons, obstinate as a pig,' &c., but I don't know whether it might not be true of Lord that from a too great eagerness of praise and popularity, and a politeness carried to a ridiculous excess, he was likely, after asserting a thing in general, to give it up again in parts. For instance, if he had said Reynolds was the first of painters, he was capable enough of giving up, as objections might happen to be severally made, first, his outline, then the grace in form,-then the colouring,—and lastly,

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