all the importunities and perplexities of business are softness and luxury, compared with the incessant cravings of vacancy, and the unsatisfactory expedients of idleness.

Hæc sunt quæ nostrâ potui te voce monere;

Vade, age.'

"As to your History of Corsica, you have no materials which others have not, or may not have. You have, somehow or other, warmed your imagination. I wish there were some cure, like the lover's leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession. Mind your own affairs, and leave the Corsicans to theirs. I am, dear Sir, your most humble servant,

cr SAM. JOHNSON."

LETTER 101. TO DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON.

"Auchinlech, Nov. 6. 1766.

"MUCH ESTEEMED AND DEAR SIR, -I plead not guilty to

66 Having thus, I hope, cleared myself of the charge brought against me, I presume you will not be displeased if I escape the punishment which you have decreed for me unheard. If you have discharged the arrows of criticism against an innocent man, you must rejoice to find they have missed him, or have not been pointed so as to wound him.

"To talk no longer in allegory, I am, with all deference, going to offer a few observations in defence of my Latin, which you have found fault with.

"You think I should have used spei primæ instead of spei alteræ. Spes is, indeed, often used to express

(1) The passage omitted explained the transaction to which the preceding letter had alluded.

something on which we have a future dependence, as in Virg. Eclog. i. l. 14.

— modo namque gemellos

Spem gregis, ah! silice in nudâ connixa reliquit :'

and in Georg. iii. 1. 473.—

'Spemque gregemque simul,'

Yet it is also used to ex

for the lambs and the sheep. press any thing on which we have a present dependence, and is well applied to a man of distinguished influence,— our support, our refuge, our præsidium, as Horace calls Mæcenas. So, Æneid xii. 1. 57., Queen Amata addresses her son-in-law, Turnus :- 'Spes tu nunc una :' and he was then no future hope, for she adds,

which might have been said of my Lord Bute some years ago. Now I consider the present Earl of Bute to be Excelsæ familiæ de Bute spes prima;' and my Lord Mountstuart, as his eldest son, to be 'spes altera.' So in Æneid xii. 1. 168., after having mentioned Pater Æneas, who was the present spes, the reigning spes, as my German friends would say, the spes prima, the poet adds,

Et juxta Ascanius, magnæ spes altera Romæ.'(1)

"You think altera ungrammatical, and you tell me it should have been alteri. You must recollect, that in

(1) It is very strange that Johnson, who in his letter quotes the Eneid, should not have recollected this obvious and decisive authority for spes altera, nor yet the remarkable use of these words, attributed to Cicero, by Servius and Donatus; the expressions of the latter are conclusive in Mr. Boswell's favour: "At cum Cicero quosdam versus (Virgilii) audisset, in fine ait: Magnæ spes altera Romæ.' Quasi ipse linguæ Latina spes prima fuisset, et Maro futurus esset secunda." Donat. vit. Vir. § 41.-CROKER.

old times alter was declined regularly; and when the ancient fragments preserved in the Juris Civilis Fontes were written, it was certainly declined in the way that I use it. This, I should think, may protect a lawyer who writes altera in a dissertation upon part of his own science. But as I could hardly venture to quote fragments of old law to so classical a man as Mr Johnson, I have not made an accurate search into these remains, to find examples of what I am able to produce in poetical composition. We find in Plaut. Rudens, act iii. scene 4.

'Nam huic alteræ patria quæ sit profecto nescio.'

Plautus is, to be sure, an old comic writer; but in the days of Scipio and Lelius, we find Terent. Heautontim. act ii. scene 3..

hoc ipsa in itinere alteræ Dum narrat, forte audivi.'

"You doubt my having authority for using genus absolutely, for what we call family, that is, for illustrious extraction. Now I take genus in Latin to have much the same signification with birth in English; both in their primary meaning expressing simply descent, but both made to stand kar' oxnv for noble descent. Genus is thus used in Hor. lib. ii. Sat. v. 1. 8.

'Et genus et virtus, nisi cum re, vilior algâ est.'

And in lib. i. Epist. vi. 1. 37.

Et genus et formam Regina Pecunia donat.'

And in the celebrated contest between Ajax and Ulysses, Ovid's Metamorph. lib. xiii. 1. 140.

'Nam genus et proavos, et quæ non fecimus ipsi,

Vix ea nostra voco.'

"Homines nullius originis, for nullis orti majoribus, or nullo loco nati, is, 'you are afraid, barbarous.'

"Origo is used to signify extraction, as in Virg. Eneid i. 286.

'Nascetur pulchrâ Trojanus origine Cæsar :'

and in Eneid x. 1. 618. —

'Ille tamen nostrâ deducit origine nomen.

and as nullus is used for obscure, is it not in the genius of the Latin language to write nullius originis, for obscure extraction ?

"I have defended myself as well as I could.

'Might I venture to differ from you with regard to the utility of vows? I am sensible that it would be very dangerous to make vows rashly, and without a due consideration. But I cannot help thinking that they may often be of great advantage to one of a variable judgment and irregular inclinations. I always remember a passage in one of your letters to our Italian friend Baretti ; where, talking of the monastic life, you say you do not wonder that serious men should put themselves under the protection of a religious order, when they have found how unable they are to take care of themselves.(1) For my own part, without affecting to be a Socrates, I am sure I have a more than ordinary struggle to maintain with the Evil Principle; and all the methods I can devise are little enough to keep me tolerably steady in the paths of rectitude.

“I am ever, with the highest veneration, your affectionate humble servant,

It

"JAMES Boswell."

appears from Johnson's diary, that he was this year at Mr. Thrale's (2), from before Midsummer

(1) [See antè, Vol. II. p. 132.]

(2) In the year 1766, Mr. Johnson's health grew so bad, that he could not stir out of his room, in the court he inhabited, for many weeks together I think months. Mr. Thrale's attentions

till after Michaelmas, and that he afterwards passed a month at Oxford. He had then contracted a great intimacy with Mr. Chambers of that University, afterwards Sir Robert Chambers, one of the Judges in India.

He published nothing this year in his own name; but the noble Dedication to the King, of Gwyn's "London and Westminster Improved,"(1) was written by him; and he furnished the Preface,† and several of the pieces, which compose a volume of Miscellanies by Mrs. Anna Williams, the blind lady who

and my own now became so acceptable to him, that he often lamented to us the horrible condition of his mind, which he said was nearly distracted; and though he charged us to make him odd solemn promises of secrecy on so strange a subject, yet when we waited on him one morning, and heard him, in the most pathetic terms, beg the prayers of Dr. Delap [Rector of Lewes], who had left him as we came in, I felt excessively affected with grief, and well remember that my husband involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from provocation at hearing a man so wildly proclaim what he could at last persuade no one to believe, and what, if true, would have been so very unfit to reveal. Mr. Thrale went away soon after, leaving me with him, and bidding me prevail on him to quit his close habitation in the court and come with us to Streatham, where I undertook the care of his health, and had the honour and happiness of contributing to its restoration. - PIOZZI.

(1) In this work Mr. Gwyn proposed the principle, and in many instances the details, of the most important improvements which have been made in the metropolis in our day. A bridge near Somerset House -a great street from the Haymarket to the New Road-the improvement of the interior of St. James's Park-quays along the Thames. -new approaches to London Bridge the removal of Smithfield market, and several other suggestions on which we pride ourselves as original designs of our own times, are all to be found in Mr. Gwyn's able and curious work. It is singular, that he denounced a row of houses then building in Pimlico, as intolerable nuisances to Buckingham Palace, and of these very houses the public voice now calls for the destruction. Gwyn had "the prophetic eye of taste." CROKER.