one ten-guinea piece. What I mean is, that you can show me no passage where there is simply a description of material objects, without any intermixture of moral notions, which produces such au effect." Mr. Murphy mentioned Shakspeare's description of the night before the battle of Agincourt; but it was observed, it had men in it. Mr. Davies suggested the speech of Juliet, in which she figures herself awaking in the tomb of her ancestors. Some one mentioned the description of Dover cliff. JOHNSON. "No, sir, it should be all precipice-all vacuum. The crows impede your fall. The diminished appearance of the boats, and other circumstances, are all very good description, but do not impress the mind at once with the horrible idea of immense height. The impression is divided; you pass on, by computation, from one stage of the tremendous space to another. Had the girl in The Mourning Bride, said, she could not cast her shoe to the top of one of the pillars in the temple, it would not have aided the idea, but weakened it."

Another time, he talked of the passage in Congreve with high commendation, and said, "Shakspeare never has six lines together without a fault, Perhaps, you may find seven; but this does not refute my general assertion. If I come to an orchard, and say there's no fruit here, and then comes a poring man, who finds two apples and three pears, and tells me,' Sir, you are mistaken, I have found both apples and pears,' I should laugh at him. What would that be to the purpose?"

.

BOSWELL." What do you think of Dr. Young's Night Thoughts, sir?" JOHNSON. "Why, sir, there are many fine things in them.”

VOL. II.

D

One Sunday, Boswell dined with him at Mr. Hoole's. They talked of Pope. JOHNSON." He wrote his Dunciad for fame; that was his primary motive. Had it not been for that, the dunces might have railed against him till they were weary, without his troubling himself about them. He delighted to vex them, no doubt; but he had more delight in seeing how well he could vex them."

The Odes to Obscurity and Oblivion, in ridicule of "cool Mason, and warm Gray," being mentioned, Johnson said, They are Colman's best things.” Upon its being observed, that it was believed these odes were made by Colman and Lloyd jointly;— JOHNSON. "Nay, sir, how can two people make an ode? Perhaps, one made one of them, and one the other." Boswell observed, that two people had made a play, and quoted the anecdote of Beaumont and Fletcher, who were brought under suspicion of treason, because, while concerting the plan of a tragedy when sitting together at a tavern, one of them was overheard saying to the other, "I'll kill the king." JOHNSON. "The first of these odes is the best; but they are both good. They exposed a very bad kind of writing." BOSWELL. "Surely, sir, Mr. Mason's Elfrida is a fine poem: at least, you will allow there are some good passages in it.” JOHNSON." There are now and then some good imitations of Milton's bad manner."

Mrs. Thrale disputed with him on the merit of Prior. He attacked him powerfully; said he wrote of love like a man who had never felt it: his love verses were college verses; and he repeated the song "Alexis shunn'd his fellow swains," &c. in soludicrous à manner, as to make us all wonder how any

one could have been pleased with such fantastical stuff. Mrs. Thrale stood to her gun with great courage, in defence of amorous ditties, which Johnson despised, till he at last silenced her by saying, "My dear lady, talk no more of this: nonsense can be defended but by nonsense."

Mrs. Thrale then praised Garrick's talents for light gay poetry; and, as a specimen, repeated his song in Florizel and Perdita, and dwelt with peculiar pleasure on this line:

I'd smile with the simple, and feed with the poor.

JOHNSON. "Nay, my dear lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with the simple;-what folly is that! And who would feed with the poor, that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich." Boswell repeated this sally to Garrick, and wondered to find his sensibility as a writer not a little irritated by it. To soothe him, he observed, that Johnson spared nobody; and quoted the passage in Horace, in which he compares one who attacks his friends for the sake of a laugh, to a pushing ox, that is marked by a bunch of hay put upon his horns: fænum habet in cornu. "Ay," said Garrick vehemently, "he has a whole mow of it."

Speaking of Homer, whom he venerated as the prince of poets, Johnson remarked, that the advice given to Glaucus by his father, when he sent him to the Trojan war, was the noblest exhortation that could be instanced in any heathen writer, and comprised in a single line :

Αιεν αριστεύειν, και υπείροχον εμμενα ειν

which is translated by Dr. Clarke thus :—“ Ut semper fortissime rem gererem, et superior virtute essem aliis."

A proposition which had been agitated, that monuments to eminent persons should, for the time to come, be erected in St. Paul's church as well as in Westminster-abbey, was mentioned; and it was asked, who should be honoured by having his monument first erected there. Somebody suggested Pope. JOHNSON. "Why, sir, as Pope was a Roman Catholic, I would not have his to be first. I think, Milton's rather should have the precedence. I think more highly of him now than I did at twenty. There is more thinking in him and in Butler, than in any of our poets."

He spoke slightingly of Dyer's Fleece." The subject, sir, cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets ? Yet you will hear many people talk to you gravely of that excellent poem, The Fleece." Having talked of Grainger's Sugar Cane, Boswell mentioned to him Mr. Langton's having told him that this poem, being read in manuscript at sir Joshua Reynolds's, had made all the assembled wits burst into a laugh, when, after much blank verse pomp, the poet began a new paragraph thus :

Now, Muse, let's sing of rats.

And what increased the ridicule was, that one of the company, who slyly overlooked the reader, perceived that the word had been originally mice, and had been altered to rats, as more dignified.*

Such is this little laughable incident, which has been often related. Dr. Percy, the bishop of Dromore, who was

This passage does not appear in the printed work; Dr. Grainger, or some of his friends, it should seem, having become sensible that introducing even rats, in a grave poem, might be liable to banter. He however, could not bring himself to relinquish the idea; for they are thus periphrastically exhibited in his poem, as it now stands:

Nor with less waste the whisker'd vermin race,
A countless clan, despoil the lowland cane.

Johnson said, that Dr. Grainger was an agreeable man; a man who would do any good that was in his power. His translation of Tibullus, he thought, was very well done, but The Sugar Cane, a poem,

an intimate friend of Dr. Grainger, and has a particular regard for his memory, gave the following explanation:

"The passage in question was originally not liable to such a perversion: for the author, having occasion in that part of his work to mention the havock made by rats and mice, had introduced the subject in a kind of mock heroic, and a parody of Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice, invoking the Muse of the old Grecian bard, in an elegant and well turned manner. In this state I had seen it; but afterwards, unknown to me and other friends, he had been persuaded, contrary to his own better judgment, to alter it, so as to produce the unlucky effect above mentioned."

The above was written by the bishop when he had not the poem itself to recur to: and though the account given was true of it at one period, yet, as Dr. Grainger afterwards altered the passage in question, the remarks in the text do not now apply to the printed poem.

The bishop gives this character of Dr Grainger :—” He was not only a man of genius and learning, but had many excellent virtues; being one of the most generous, friendly, and benevolent men I ever knew."