those you should wish to satisfy. Next to them rate the natural judges; but ever despise those opinions that are formed by the rules.'-Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 180. Later on she writes:'The natural feelings of untaught hearers ought never to be slighted; and Dr. Johnson has told me the same a thousand times; ib. ii. 128. Johnson in the Green Room. Mr. Richard Herne Shepherd, in Walfourd's Antiquarian for January, 1887, p. 34, asserts that the actual words which Johnson used when he told Garrick that he would no longer frequent his Green Room were indecent; so indecent that Mr. Shepherd can only venture to satisfy those whom he calls students by informing them of them privately. For proof of this charge against the man whose boast it was that 'obscenity had always been repressed in his company' (ante, iv. 341) he brings forward John Wilkes. The story, indeed, as it is told by Boswell, is not too trustworthy, for he had it through Hume from Garrick. As it reaches Mr. Shepherd it comes from Garrick through Wilkes. Garrick, no doubt, as Johnson says (ante, v. 446), was, as a companion, ‘restrained by some principle,' and had 'some delicacy of feeling.' Nevertheless, in his stories, he was, we may be sure, no more on oath than a man is in lapidary inscriptions (ante, ii. 466). It is possible that he reported Johnson's very words to Hume, and that Hume did not change them in reporting them to Boswell. Whatever they were, they were spoken in 1749 and published in 1791, when Johnson had been dead six years, Garrick twelve years, and Hume fourteen years. It is idle to dream that they can now be conjecturally emended. But it is worse than idle to bring in as evidence John Wilkes. What entered his ear as purity itself might issue from his mouth as the grossest obscenity. He had no delicacy of feeling. No principle restrained him. When he comes to bear testimony, and aims a shaft at any man's character, the bow that he draws is drawn with the weakness of the hand of a wornout and shameless profligate. Mr. Shepherd quotes an unpublished letter of Boswell to Wilkes, dated Rome, April 22, 1765, to show that the two men had become familiars, not only long before Wilkes's famous meeting meeting with Dr. Johnson was brought about, but even before the friendship of Boswell himself with Johnson had been consolidated.' It needs no unpublished letters to show that. It must be known to every attentive reader of Boswell. See ante, i. 457, and ii. 13. Frederick III, King of Prussia. (Vol. i. p. 357.) Boswell should have written Frederick II. Boswell's Visit to Rousseau and Voltaire. (Vol. i. p. 503; and vol. ii. p. 13.) Boswell to Andrew Mitchell, Esq., His Britannic Majesty's Minister at Berlin. 'Berlin, 28 August, 1764. 'I have had another letter from my father, in which he continues of opinion that travelling is of very little use, and may do a great deal of harm. I esteem and love my father, and I am determined to do what is in,my power to make him easy and happy. But you will allow that I may endeavour to make him happy, and at the same time not to be too hard upon myself. I must use you so much with the freedom of a friend as to tell you that with the vivacity which you allowed me I have a melancholy disposition. I have made excursions into the fields of amusement, perhaps of folly. I have found that amusement and folly are beneath me, and that without some laudable pursuit my life must be insipid and wearisome. My father seems much against my going to Italy, but gives me leave to go from this, and pass some months in Paris. I own that the words of the Apostle Paul, "I must see Rome," are strongly borne in upon my mind. It would give me infinite pleasure. It would give taste for a life-time, and I should go home to Auchinleck with serene contentment.' .... After stating that he is going to Geneva, he continues : 'I shall see Voltaire; I shall also see Switzerland and Rousseau. These two men are to me greater objects than most statues or pictures.'-Nichols's Literary History, vii. 318. Superficiality Superficiality of the French Writers. (Vol. i. p. 526.) Gibbon, writing of the year 1759, says : 'In France, to which my ideas [in the Essay on the Study of Literature] were confined, the learning and language of Greece and Rome were neglected by a philosophic age. The guardian of those studies, the Academy of Inscriptions, was degraded to the lowest rank among the three royal societies of Paris; the new appellation of Erudits was contemptuously applied to the successors of Lipsius and Casaubon; and I was provoked to hear (see M. d'Alembert, Discours préliminaire à l'Encyclopédie) that the exercise of the memory, their sole merit, had been superseded by the nobler faculties of the imagination and the judgment.'-Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, ed. 1827, i. 104. A Synod of Cooks. (Vol. i. p. 544.) When Johnson spoke of 'a Synod of Cooks' he was, I conjecture, thinking of Milton's 'Synod of Gods,' in Beelzebub's speech in Paradise Lost, book ii. line 391. Johnson and Bishop Percy. (Vol. i. p. 562.) Bishop Percy in a letter to Boswell says:-'When in 1756 or 1757 I became acquainted with Johnson, he told me he had lived twenty years in London, but not very happily.'-Nichols's Literary History, vii. 307. Barclay's Answer to Kenrick's Review of Johnson's 'Shakespeare.' (Vol. i. p. 576.) Neither in the British Museum nor in the Bodleian have I been able to find a copy of this book. A Defence of Mr. Kenrick's Review, 1766, does not seem to contain any reply to such a work as Barclay's. Mrs. Piozzi's soon. 'I am ashamed that I have yet seven years to write of his life. Mrs. (Thrale) Piozzi's Collection of his letters will be out I saw a sheet at the printing-house yesterday. . . . It is wonderful what avidity there still is for everything relative to Johnson. I dined at Mr. Malone's on Wednesday with Mr. W. G. Hamilton, Mr. Flood, Mr. Windham, Mr. Courtenay, &c.; and Mr. Hamilton observed very well what a proof it was of Johnson's merit that we had been talking of him all the afternoon.'-Nichols's Literary History, vii. 309. Johnson on romantic virtue. (Vol. ii. p. 87.) 'Dr. Johnson used to advise his friends to be upon their guard against romantic virtue, as being founded upon no settled principle. "A plank," said he, "that is tilted up at one end must of course fall down on the other."'-William Seward, Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons, ii. 461. 'Old' Baxter on toleration. (Vol. ii. p. 290.) The Rev. John Hamilton Davies, B.A., F.R.H.S., Rector of St. Nicholas's, Worcester, and author of The Life of Richard Baxter of Kidderminster, Preacher and Prisoner (London, Kent & Co., 1887), kindly informs me, in answer to my inquiries, that he believes that Johnson may allude to the following passage in the fourth chapter of Baxter's Reformed Pastor: 'I think the Magistrate should be the hedge of the Church. I am against the two extremes of universal license and persecuting tyranny. The Magistrate must be allowed the use of his reason, to know the cause, and follow his own judgment, not punish men against it. I am the less sorry that the Magistrate doth so little interpose.' England England barren in good historians. (Vol. ii. p. 271, n. 2.) Gibbon, writing of the year 1759, says : 'The old reproach that no British altars had been raised to the muse of history was recently disproved by the first performances of Robertson and Hume, the histories of Scotland and of the Stuarts.'-Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, ed. 1827, i. 103. An instance of Scotch nationality. (Vol. ii. p. 351.) · Lord Camden, when pressed by Dr. Berkeley (the Bishop's son) to appoint a Scotchman to some office, replied: 'I have many years ago sworn that I will never introduce a Scotchman into any office; for if you introduce one he will contrive some way or other to introduce forty more cousins or friends.'-G. M. Berkeley's Poems, p. ccclxxi. Mortality in the Foundling Hospital of London. 'From March 25, 1741, to December 31, 1759, the number of children received into the Foundling Hospital is 14,994, of which have died to December 31, 1759, 8,465.'-A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. 1769, vol. ii. p. 121. A great many of these died, no doubt, after they had left the Hospital. Mr. Planta. (Vol. ii. p. 457, n. 4.) The reference is no doubt to Mr. Joseph Planta, Assistant-Librarian of the British Museum 1773, Principal Librarian 1799-1827. See Edwards's Lives of the Founders of the British Museum, pp. 517 sqq.; and Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, vol. vii. pp. 677–8. 'Unitarian,' (Vol. ii. p. 468, n. 1.) John Locke in his Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity |