‘It has been well observed, that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 333. ‘The main of life is indeed composed of small incidents and petty occurrences.’ Ib. ii. 322. Dr. Franklin (Memoirs, i. 199) says:—‘Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.’
[1286] Boswell wrote the next day:—‘We sat till between two and three. He took me by the hand cordially, and said, “My dear Boswell, I love you very much.” Now Temple, can I help indulging vanity?’ Letters of Boswell, p. 27. Fourteen years later Boswell was afraid that he kept Johnson too late up. ‘No, Sir,’ said he, ‘I don’t care though I sit all night with you.’ Post, Sept. 23, 1777. See also post, April 7, 1779, where Johnson, speaking of these early days, said to Boswell, ‘it was not the wine that made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.’
[1287] Tuesday was the 19th.
[1288] ‘The elder brother of the first Lord Rokeby, called long Sir Thomas Robinson, on account of his height, and to distinguish him from Sir Thomas Robinson, first Lord Grantham. It was on his request for an epigram that Lord Chesterfield made the distich:—
“Unlike my subject will I make my song,
It shall be witty, and it shan’t be long,”
and to whom he said in his last illness, “Ah, Sir Thomas, it will be sooner over with me than it would be with you, for I am dying by inches.” Lord Chesterfield was very short.’ CROKER. Southey, writing of Rokeby Hall, which belonged to Robinson, says that ‘Long Sir Thomas found a portrait of Richardson in the house; thinking Mr. Richardson a very unfit personage to be suspended in effigy among lords, ladies, and baronets, he ordered the painter to put him on the star and blue riband, and then christened the picture Sir Robert Walpole.’ Southey’s Life, iii. 346. See also ante, p. 259 note 2, and post, 1770, near the end of Dr. Maxwell’s Collectanea.
[1289] Johnson (Works, vi. 440) had written of Frederick the Great in 1756:—‘His skill in poetry and in the French language has been loudly praised by Voltaire, a judge without exception if his honesty were equal to his knowledge.’ Boswell, in his Hypochondriacks, records a conversation that he had with Voltaire on memory:—‘I asked him if he could give me any notion of the situation of our ideas which we have totally forgotten at the time, yet shall afterwards recollect. He paused, meditated a little, and acknowledged his ignorance in the spirit of a philosophical poet by repeating as a very happy allusion a passage in Thomson’s Seasons—“Aye,” said he, “Where sleep the winds when it is calm?”’ London Mag. 1783, p. 157. The passage is in Thomson’s Winter, l. 116:—
‘In what far-distant region of the sky,
Hush’d in deep silence, sleep ye when ‘tis calm?’
[1290] See post, ii. 54, note 3.
[1291] Bernard Lintot, the father, published Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey. Over the sale of the Odyssey a quarrel arose between the two men. Johnson’s Works, viii. 251, 274. Lintot is attacked in the Dunciad, i. 40 and ii. 53; He was High-Sheriff for Sussex in 1736—the year of his death. Gent. Mag. vi. 110. The son is mentioned in Johnson’s Works, viii. 282.
[1292] ‘July 19, 1763. I was with Mr. Johnson to-day. I was in his garret up four pair of stairs; it is very airy, commands a view of St. Paul’s and many a brick roof. He has many good books, but they are all lying in confusion and dust.’ Letters of Boswell, p. 30. On Good Friday, 1764, Johnson made the following entry:—‘I hope to put my rooms in order: Disorder I have found one great cause of idleness.’ On his birthday in the same year he wrote:—‘Tomorrow I purpose to regulate my room.’ Pr. and Med. pp. 50, 60.
[1293] See ante, p. 140, and post, under Sept. 9, 1779.
[1294] Afterwards Rector of Mamhead, Devonshire. He is the grandfather of the present Bishop of London. He and Boswell had been fellow-students at the University of Edinburgh, and seemed in youth to have had an equal amount of conceit. ‘Recollect,’ wrote Boswell, ‘how you and I flattered ourselves that we were to be the greatest men of our age.’ Letters of Boswell, p. 159. They began to correspond at least as early as 1758. The last letter was one from Boswell on his death-bed. Johnson thus mentions Temple (Works, viii. 480):—‘Gray’s character I am willing to adopt, as Mr. Mason has done, from a letter written to my friend Mr. Boswell by the Revd. Mr. Temple, Rector of St. Gluvias in Cornwall; and am as willing as his warmest well-wisher to believe it true.’
[1295] Johnson (Works, vii. 240) quotes the following by Edmund Smith, and written some time after 1708:—‘It will sound oddly to posterity, that, in a polite nation, in an enlightened age, under the direction of the most literary property in 1710, whether by wise, most learned, and most generous encouragers of knowledge in the world, the property of a mechanick should be better secured than that of a scholar! that the poorest manual operations should be more valued than the noblest products of the brain! that it should be felony to rob a cobbler of a pair of shoes, and no crime to deprive the best authour of his whole subsistence! that nothing should make a man a sure title to his own writings but the stupidity of them!’ See post, May 8, 1773, and Feb.7, 1774; and Boswell’s Hebrides, Aug. 17 and 20, 1773.
[1296] The question arose, after the passing of the first statute respecting literary property in 1710, whether by certain of its provisions this perpetual copyright at common law was extinguished for the future. The question was solemnly argued before the Court of King’s Bench, when Lord Mansfield presided, in 1769. The result was a decision in favour of the common-law right as unaltered by the statute, with the disapproval however of Mr. Justice Yates. In 1774 the same point was brought before the House of Lords, and the decision of the court below reversed by a majority of six judges in eleven, as Lord Mansfield, who adhered to the opinion of the minority, declined to interfere; it being very unusual, from motives of delicacy, for a peer to support his own judgment on appeal to the House of Lords. Penny Cylco. viii. I. See post, Feb. 7, 1774. Lord Shelburne, on Feb 27, 1774, humourously describes the scene in the Lords to the Earl of Chatham:—‘Lord Mansfield showed himself the merest Captain Bobadil that, I suppose, ever existed in real life. You can, perhaps, imagine to yourself the Bishop of Carlyle, an old metaphysical head of a college, reading a paper, not a speech, out of an old sermon book, with very bad sight leaning on the table, Lord Mansfield sitting at it, with eyes of fixed melancholy looking at him, knowing that the bishop’s were the only eyes in the House who could not meet his; the judges behind him, full of rage at being drawn into so absurd an opinion, and abandoned in it by their chief; the Bishops waking, as your Lordship knows they do, just before they vote, and staring on finding something the matter; while Lord Townshend was close to the bar, getting Mr. Dunning to put up his glass to look at the head of criminal justice.’ Chatham Corres. iv. 327.
[1297] See post April 15 1778, note.
[1298] Dr. Franklin (Memoirs iii. 178), complaining of the high prices of English books, describes ‘the excessive artifices made use of to puff up a paper of verses into a pamphlet, a pamphlet into an octavo, and an octavo into a quarto with white-lines, exorbitant margins, &c., to such a degree that the selling of paper seems now the object, and printing on it only the pretence.’
[1299] Boswell was on friendly terms with him. He wrote to Erskine on Dec. 2, 1761:—‘I am just now returned from eating a most excellent pig with the most magnificent Donaldson.’ Boswell and Erskine Correspondence, p. 20.
