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whom I expected most, and whom I met with sincere benevolence, has lost the beauty and gaiety of youth, without having gained much of the wisdom of age. I wandered about for five days, and took the first convenient opportunity of returning to a place where, if there is not much happiness, there is, at least, such a diversity of good and evil, that slight vexations do not fix upon the heart.

'I think in a few weeks to try another excursion; though to what end? Let me know, my Baretti, what has been the result of your return to your own country: whether time has made any alteration for the better, and whether, when the first raptures of salutation were over, you did not find your thoughts confessed their disappointment.

'Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his own town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility, a mind able to see common incidents in their real state is disposed by very common incidents to very serious contemplations. Let us trust that a time will come when the present moment shall be no longer irksome: when we shall not borrow all our happiness from hope, which at last is to end in disappointment.

'I beg that you will show Mr. Beauclerk all the civilities which you have in your power; for he has always been kind to me.

'I have lately seen Mr. Stratico, Professor of Padua, who has told me of your quarrel with an Abbot of the Celestine order, but had not the particulars very ready in his memory. When you write to Mr. Marsili, let him know that I remember him with kindness.

'May you, my Baretti, be very happy at Milan, or some other place nearer to, sir, your most affectionate humble servant,

'SAM. JOHNSON.'

The accession of George II. to the throne of these kingdoms opened a new and brighter prospect to men of literary merit, who had been honoured with no mark of royal favour in the preceding reign. His present Majesty's education in this country, as well as his taste and beneficence, prompted him to be the patron of science and the arts; and early this year, Johnson having been represented to him as a very learned and good man, without any certain provision, his Majesty was pleased to grant him a pension of three hundred pounds a year. The Earl of Bute, who was then Prime Minister, had the honour to announce this instance of his sovereign's bounty, concerning which many and various stories, all equally erroneous, have been propagated; maliciously representing it as a political bribe to Johnson to desert his avowed principles, and become the tool of a Government

which he held to be founded in usurpation. I have taken care to have it in my power to refute them from the most authentic information. Lord Bute told me that Mr. Wedderburne, now Lord Loughborough, was the person who first mentioned this subject to him. Lord Loughborough told me that the pension was granted to Johnson solely as the reward of his literary merit, without any stipulation whatever, or even tacit understanding that he should write for the Administration. His lordship added, that he was confident the political tracts which Johnson afterwards did write, as they were entirely consonant with his own opinions, would have been written by him though no pension had been granted to him.

Mr. Thomas Sheridan and Mr. Murphy, who then lived a good deal both with him and Mr. Wedderburne, told me that they previously talked with Johnson upon this matter, and that it was perfectly understood by all parties that the pension was merely honorary. Sir Joshua Reynolds told me that Johnson called on him after his Majesty's intention had been notified to him, and said he wished to consult his friends as to the propriety of his accepting this mark of the royal favour, after the definitions which he had given in his Dictionary of pension and pensioners. He said he should not have Sir Joshua's answer till next day, when he would call again, and desired he might think of it. Sir Joshua answered that he was clear to give his opinion then, that there could be no objection to his receiving from the king a reward for literary merit; and that certainly the definitions in his Dictionary were not applicable to him. Johnson, it should seem, was satisfied, for he did not call again till he had accepted the pension, and had waited on Lord Bute to thank him. He then told Sir Joshua that Lord Bute said to him expressly, 'It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done.' His lordship, he said, behaved in the handsomest manner. He repeated the words twice, that he might be sure Johnson heard them, and thus set his mind perfectly at ease. This nobleman, who has been so virulently abused, acted with great honour in this instance, and displayed a mind truly liberal. A minister of a more narrow and selfish disposition would have availed himself of such an opportunity to fix an implied obligation on a man of Johnson's powerful talents to give him his support.

Mr. Murphy and the late Mr. Sheridan severally contended for the distinction of having been the first who mentioned to Mr. Wedderburne that Johnson ought to have a pension.

1 This was said by Lord Bute, as Dr. Burney was informed by Johnson himself in answer to a question which he put, previously to his acceptance of the intended bounty: Pray, my Lord, what am I expected to do for this pension?'-MALONE.

Johnson, who was much pleased with this jaunt, and declared he had derived from it a great accession of new ideas. He was entertained at the seats of several noblemen and gentlemen in the west of England; but the greatest part of this time was passed at Plymouth, where the magnificence of the navy, the ship-building and all its circumstances, afforded him a grand sub

When I spoke of this to Lord Loughborough, wishing to know if he recollected the prime mover in the business, he said, 'All his friends assisted; and when I told him that Mr. Sheridan strenuously asserted his claim to it, his lordship said, 'He rang the bell.' And it is but just to add, that Mr. Sheridan told me, that when he communicated to Dr. Johnson that a pension was to be granted him, he replied, inject of contemplation. The Commissioner of the a fervour of gratitude, 'The English language does not afford me terms adequate to my feelings on this occasion. I must have recourse to the French. I am pénétré with his Majesty's goodness.' When I repeated this to Dr. Johnson, he did not contradict it.

His definitions of pension and pensioner, partly founded on the satirical verses of Pope, which he quotes, may be generally true; and yet everybody must allow that there may be, and have been, instances of pensions given and received upon liberal and honourable terms. Thus, then, it is clear that there was nothing inconsistent or humiliating in Johnson's accepting of a pension so unconditionally and so honourably offered to him.

But I shall not detain my readers longer by any words of my own, on a subject on which I am happily enabled, by the favour of the Earl of Bute, to present them with what Johnson himself wrote; his lordship having been pleased to communicate to me a copy of the following letter to his late father, which does great honour both to the writer and to the noble person to whom it is addressed :

'TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF BUTE. 'July 20, 1762.

MY LORD,-When the bills were yesterday delivered to me by Mr. Wedderburne, I was informed by him of the future favours which his Majesty has, by your lordship's recommendation, been induced to intend for me.

'Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed; your lordship's kindness includes every circumstance that can gratify delicacy or enforce obligation. You have conferred your favours on a man who has neither alliance nor interest, who has not merited them by services, nor courted them by officiousness; you have spared him the shame of solicitation and the anxiety of suspense.

What has been thus elegantly given, will, I hope, not be reproachfully enjoyed; I shall endeavour to give your lordship the only recompense which generosity desires, — the gratification of finding that your benefits are not improperly bestowed. I am, my Lord, your lordship's most obliged, most obedient, and most humble servant,

'SAM. JOHNSON.'

This year his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, paid a visit of some weeks to his native county, Devonshire, in which he was accompanied by

Dockyard paid him the compliment of ordering the yacht to convey him and his friend to the Eddystone, to which they accordingly sailed. But the weather was so tempestuous that they could not land.

Reynolds and he were at this time the guests of Dr. Mudge, the celebrated surgeon, and now physician of that place, not more distinguished for quickness of parts and variety of knowledge, than loved and esteemed for his amiable manners; and here Johnson formed an acquaintance with Dr. Mudge's father, that very eminent divine, the Reverend Zachariah Mudge, Prebendary of Exeter, who was idolized in the west, both for his excellence as a preacher and the uniform perfect propriety of his private conduct. He preached a sermon purposely that Johnson might hear him; and we shall see afterwards that Johnson honoured his memory by drawing his character. While Johnson was at Plymouth, he saw a great many of its inhabitants, and was not sparing of his very entertaining conversation. It was here that he made that frank and truly original confession, that 'ignorance, pure ignorance,' was the cause of a wrong definition in his Dictionary of the word pastern, to the no small surprise of the lady who put the question to him; who, having the most profound reverence for his character, so as almost to suppose him endowed with infallibility, expected to hear an explanation (of what, to be sure, seemed strange to a common reader) drawn from some deep-learned source with which she was unacquainted.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom I was obliged for my information concerning this excursion, mentions a very characteristical anecdote of Johnson while at Plymouth. Having observed that, in consequence of the dockyard, a new town had arisen about two miles off as a rival to the old; and knowing, from his sagacity and just observation of human nature, that it is certain, if a man hates at all, he will hate his next neighbour, he concluded that this new and

1 At one of these seats, Dr. Amyat, physician in London, told me he happened to meet him. In order to amuse him till dinner should be ready, he was taken out to walk in the garden. The master of the house thinking it proper to introduce something scientific into the conversation, addressed him thus: Are you a botanist, Dr. Johnson?' 'No, sir,' answered Johnson, 'I am not a botanist; and' (alluding no doubt to his near-sightedness) 'should I wish to become a botanist, I must first turn myself into a reptile.'-Boswell.

opinion, and in his own, was hastening to Naples for the recovery of his health; but he has stopped at Paris, and I know not when he will proceed. Langton is with him.

rising town could not but excite the envy and jealousy of the old, in which conjecture he was very soon confirmed; he therefore set himself resolutely on the side of the old town, the established town, in which his lot was cast, consider- I will not trouble you with speculations ing it as a kind of duty to stand by it. He about peace and war. The good or ill success accordingly entered warmly into its interests, of battles and embassies extends itself to a very and upon every occasion talked of the dockers, small part of domestic life: we all have good as the inhabitants of the new town were called, and evil, which we feel more sensibly than our as upstarts and aliens. Plymouth is very plen- petty part of public miscarriage or prosperity. tifully supplied with water by a river brought I am sorry for your disappointment, with which into it from a great distance, which is so abun- you seem more touched than I should expect a dant that it runs to waste in the town. The man of your resolution and experience to have Dock, or New-town, being totally destitute of been, did I not know that general truths are water, petitioned Plymouth that a small portion | seldom applied to particular occasions, and of the conduit might be permitted to go to them, that the fallacy of our self-love extends itself and this was now under consideration. Johnson, as wide as our interest or affections. Every affecting to entertain the passions of the place, man believes that mistresses are unfaithful, was violent in opposition; and half laughing at and patrons capricious; but he excepts his own himself for his pretended zeal where he had no mistress and his own patron. We have all concern, exclaimed, 'No, no; I am against the learned that greatness is negligent and condockers; I am a Plymouth man. Rogues! let temptuous, and that in courts life is often them die of thirst. They shall not have a drop!' lavished away in ungratified expectation; but he that approaches greatness, or glitters in a court, imagines that destiny has at last exempted him from the common lot.

Lord Macartney obligingly favoured me with a copy of the following letter, in his own handwriting, from the original, which was found by the present Earl of Bute among his father's papers :

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF BUTE. 'TEMPLE LANE, Nov. 3, 1762. 'MY LORD,-That generosity by which I was recommended to the favour of his Majesty will not be offended at a solicitation necessary to make that favour permanent and effectual.

·

The pension appointed to be paid me at Michaelmas I have not received, and know not where or from whom I am to ask it. I beg, therefore, that your lordship will be pleased to supply Mr. Wedderburne with such directions as may be necessary, which, I believe, his friendship will make him think it no trouble to convey to me.

'To interrupt your lordship at a time like this, with such petty difficulties, is improper and unseasonable; but your knowledge of the world has long since taught you that every man's affairs, however little, are important to himself. Every man hopes that he shall escape neglect; and with reason may every man, whose vices do not preclude his claim, expect favour from that beneficence which has been extended to, my Lord, your lordship's most obliged and most humble servant, 6 SAM. JOHNSON.'

'TO MR. JOSEPH BARETTI, AT MILAN.

'LONDON, Dec. 21, 1762. 'SIR,-You are not to suppose, with all your conviction of my idleness, that I have passed all this time without writing to my Baretti. I gave a letter to Mr. Beauclerk, who, in my

1 A friend of mine once heard him during this visit exclaim with the utmost vehemence, 'I HATE a Docker.' - BLAKEWAY.

'Do not let such evils overwhelm you as thousands have suffered, and thousands have surmounted; but turn your thoughts with vigour to some other plan of life, and keep always in your mind, that, with due submission to Providence, a man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself. Your patron's weakness or insensibility will finally do you little hurt, if he is not assisted by your own passions. Of your love I know not the propriety, nor can estimate the power; but in love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events. There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve pursuit. But love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together,' and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and successive amusement. A woman, we are sure, will not be always fair -we are not sure she will always be virtuous; and man cannot retain through life that respect and assiduity by which he pleases for a day or for a month. I do not, however, pretend to have discovered that life has anything more to be desired than a prudent and virtuous mar

1 Johnson probably wrote the evils of life together.' The words in italics, however, are not found in Baretti's original edition of this letter, but they may have been omitted inadvertently either in his transcript or at the press.-MALONE.

riage, therefore know not what counsel to give you.

CHAPTER XIV.

1763.

'If you can quit your imagination of love and greatness, and leave your hopes of prefer- THIS is to me a memorable year; for in it I ment and bridal raptures to try once more the had the happiness to obtain the acquaintance fortune of literature and industry, the way of that extraordinary man whose memoirs I am through France is now open. We flatter ournow writing an acquaintance which I shall selves that we shall cultivate with great diliever esteem as one of the most fortunate cirgence the arts of peace; and every man will cumstances in my life. Though then but twobe welcome among us who can teach us any-and-twenty, I had for several years read his thing we do not know. For your part, you will find all your old friends willing to receive you.

of solemn, elevated abstraction in which I supposed him to live in the immense metropolis of

works with delight and instruction, and had the highest reverence for their author, which had grown up in my fancy into a state of myste'Reynolds still continues to increase in repu-rious veneration, by figuring to myself a kind tation and in riches. Miss Williams, who very much loves you, goes on in the old way; Miss Cotterel is still with Mrs. Porter; Miss Charlotte is married to Dean Lewis, and has three children; Mr. Levett has married a streetwalker. But the gazette of my narration must now arrive to tell you that Bathurst went physician to the army, and died at the

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In 1763 he furnished to the Poetical Calendar, published by Fawkes and Woty, a character of Collins [*], which he afterwards ingrafted into his entire life of that admirable poet, in the collection of lives which he wrote for the body of English poetry, formed and published by the booksellers of London. His account of the melancholy depression with which Collins was severely afflicted, and which brought him to his grave, is, I think, one of the most tender and interesting passages in the whole series of his writings. He also favoured Mr. Hoole with the Dedication of his translations of Tasso to the Queen [*], which is so happily conceived and elegantly expressed, that I cannot but point it out to the peculiar notice of my readers.1

1 'MADAM,-To approach the high and illustrious has been in all ages the privilege of poets; and though translators cannot justly claim the same honour, yet they naturally follow their authors as attendants; and I hope that, in return for having enabled Tasso to diffuse his fame through the British dominions, I may be introduced by him to the presence of your Majesty.

'Tasso has a peculiar claim to your Majesty's favour, as follower and panegyrist of the House of Este, which has one common ancestor with the House of Hanover; and in reviewing his life, it is not easy to forbear a wish that he had lived in a happier time, when he might among the descendants of that illustrious family have found a more liberal and potent patronage.

'I cannot but observe, Madam, how unequally reward

London. Mr. Gentleman, a native of Ireland, who passed some years in Scotland as a player, and as an instructor in the English language, a man whose talents and worth were depressed by misfortunes, had given me a representation of the figure and manner of DICTIONARY JOHNSON! as he was then generally called; and during my first visit to London, which was for three months in 1760, Mr. Derrick, the poet, who was Gentleman's friend and countryman, flattered me with hopes that he would introduce me to Johnson, an honour of which I was very ambitious. But he never found an opportunity, which made me doubt that he had promised to do what was not in his power; till Johnson, some years afterwards, told me, 'Derrick, sir, might very well have introduced you; I had a kindness for Derrick, and am sorry he is dead.'

In the summer of 1761 Mr. Thomas Sheridan 2 was at Edinburgh, and delivered lectures upon the English language and public speaking to large and respectable audiences. I was often in his company, and heard him frequently expatiate upon Johnson's extraordinary knowledge, talents, and virtues, repeat his pointed sayings, describe his particularities, and boast of his being his

is proportioned to merit, when I reflect that the happiness which was withheld from Tasso is reserved for me; and that the poem which once hardly procured to its author the countenance of the princes of Ferrara, has attracted to its translator the favourite notice of a British queen.

'Had this been the fate of Tasso, he would have been able to have celebrated the condescension of your Majesty in nobler language, but could not have felt it with more ardent gratitude, than, Madam, your Majesty's most faithful and devoted servant.'-BOSWELL. 1 As great men of antiquity, such as Scipio Africanus, had an epithet added to their names in consequence of some celebrated action, so my illustrious friend was often called DICTIONARY JOHNSON, from that wonderful achievement of genius and labour, his Dictionary of the English Language, the merit of which I contemplate with more and more admiration. -BOSWELL.

2 Father of the celebrated Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist.

guest sometimes till two or three in the morning. At his house I hoped to have many opportunities of seeing the sage, as Mr. Sheridan obligingly assured me I should not be disappointed.

When I returned to London in the end of 1762, to my surprise and regret, I found an irreconcilable difference had taken place between Johnson and Sheridan. A pension of two hundred pounds a year had been given to Sheridan. Johnson, who, as has been already mentioned, thought slightingly of Sheridan's art, upon hearing that he was also pensioned, exclaimed, 'What! have they given him a pension? Then it is time for me to give up mine.' Whether this proceeded from a momentary indignation, as if it were an affront to his exalted merit that a player should be rewarded in the same manner with him, or was the sudden effect of a fit of peevishness, it was unluckily said, and indeed cannot be justified. Mr. Sheridan's pension was granted to him not as a player, but as a sufferer in the cause of Government, when he was manager of the Theatre Royal in Ireland, when parties ran high in 1753. And it must also be allowed that he was a man of literature, and had considerably improved the arts of reading and speaking with distinctness and propriety.

talents, we may say, in the words of that poet, 'Nam vos mutastis.'

I have dwelt the longer upon this remarkable instance of successful parts and assiduity, because it affords animating encouragement to other gentlemen of North Britain to try their fortunes in the southern part of the island, where they may hope to gratify their utmost ambition; and now that we are one people by the Union, it would surely be illiberal to maintain that they have not an equal title with the natives of any other part of his Majesty's dominions.

Johnson complained that a man who disliked him repeated his sarcasm to Mr. Sheridan, without telling him what followed, which was, that after a pause he added, 'However, I am glad that Mr. Sheridan has a pension, for he is a very good man.' Sheridan could never forgive this hasty contemptuous expression. It rankled in his mind; and though I informed him of all that Johnson said, and that he would be very glad to meet him amicably, he positively declined repeated offers which I made, and once went off abruptly from a house where he and I were engaged to dine, because he was told that Dr. Johnson was to be there. I have no sympathetic feeling with such persevering resentment. It is painful when there is a breach between those who have lived together socially and cordially; and I wonder that there is not in all such cases a mutual wish that it should be healed. I could perceive that Mr. Sheridan was by no means satisfied with Johnson's acknowledging him to be a good man. That could not soothe his in

time that I was offended, to observe Sheridan, in the Life of Swift which he afterwards published, attempting, in the writhings of his resentment, to depreciate Johnson, by characterizing him as a writer of gigantic fame, in these days of little men;' that very Johnson whom he once so highly admired and venerated.

Besides, Johnson should have recollected that Mr. Sheridan taught pronunciation to Mr. Alexander Wedderburne, whose sister was married to Sir Harry Erskine, an intimate friend of Lord Bute, who was the favourite of the king; and surely the most outrageous Whig will not maintain that, whatever ought to be the principle injured vanity. I could not but smile, at the same the disposal of offices, a pension ought never to be granted from any bias of Court connection. Mr. Macklin, indeed, shared with Mr. Sheridan the honour of instructing Mr. Wedderburne; and though it was too late in life for a Caledonian to acquire the genuine English cadence, yet so successful were Mr. Wedderburne's instructors, and his own unabating endeavours, that he got rid of the coarse part of his Scotch accent, retaining only as much of the 'native woodnote wild' as to mark his country; which, if any Scotchman should affect to forget, I should heartily despise him. Notwithstanding the difficulties which are to be encountered by those who have not had the advantage of an English education, he, by degrees, formed a mode of speaking to which Englishmen do not deny the praise of elegance. Hence his distinguished oratory, which he exerted in his own country as an advocate in the Court of Session, and a ruling elder of the kirk, has had its fame and ample reward in much higher spheres. When I look back on this noble person at Edinburgh, in situations so unworthy of his brilliant powers, and behold Lord Loughborough at London, the change seems almost like one of the metamorphoses in Ovid; and as his two preceptors, by refining his utterance, gave currency to his

This rupture with Sheridan deprived Johnson of one of his most agreeable resources for amusement in his lonely evenings; for Sheridan's well-informed, animated, and bustling mind never suffered conversation to stagnate; and Mrs. Sheridan was a most agreeable companion to an intellectual man. She was sensible, ingenious, unassuming, yet communicative. I recollect with satisfaction many pleasing hours which I passed with her under the hospitable roof of her husband, who was to me a very kind friend. Her novel, entitled Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph, contains an excellent moral, while it inculcates a future state of retribution;1

1 My position has been very well illustrated by Mr. Belsham of Bedford, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry. The fashionable doctrine,' says he, both of moralists and critics in these times is, that virtue and happiness are constant concomitants; and it is regarded as a kind of dramatic impiety to maintain that virtue should not be rewarded, nor vice punished, in the last

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