endure the reproach of not keeping me a horse.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 360. See post, March 19 and 28, 1776, Sept. 20, 1777, and Nov. 21, 1778.
[1317] This one Mrs. Macaulay was the same personage who afterwards made herself so much known as ‘the celebrated female historian.’ BOSWELL. Hannah More (Memoirs, i. 234) tells the following story of Mrs. Macaulay’s daughter:—‘Desirous from civility to take some notice of her, and finding she was reading Shakespeare, I asked her if she was not delighted with many parts of King John. “I never read the Kings, ma’am,” was the truly characteristic reply.’ See post, April 13, 1773, and May 15, 1776.
[1318] This speech was perhaps suggested to Johnson by the following passage in The Government of the Tongue (p. 106)—a book which he quotes in his Dictionary:—‘Lycurgus once said to one who importuned him to establish a popular parity in the state, “Do thou,” says he, “begin it first in thine own family.”’
[1319] The first volume was published in 1756, the second in 1782.
[1320] Warton, to use his own words, ‘did not think Pope at the head of his profession. In other words, in that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled, he is superior to all mankind; and I only say that this species of poetry is not the most excellent one of the art.’ He disposes the English poets in four classes, placing in the first only Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. ‘In the second class should be ranked such as possessed the true poetical genius in a more moderate degree, but who had noble talents for moral, ethical, and panegyrical poetry.’ In this class, in his concluding volume, he says, ‘we may venture to assign Pope a place, just above Dryden. Yet, to bring our minds steadily to make this decision, we must forget, for a moment, the divine Music Ode of Dryden; and may, perhaps, then be compelled to confess that though Dryden be the greater genius, yet Pope is the better artist.’ Warton’s Essay, i. i, vii. and ii. 404. See post, March 31, 1772.
[1321] Mr. Croker believes Joseph Warton was meant. His father, however, had been Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and was afterwards Vicar of Basingstoke and Cobham, and Professor of Poetry in his own University, so that the son could scarcely be described as being ‘originally poor.’ It is, no doubt, after Boswell’s fashion to introduce in consecutive paragraphs the same person once by name and once anonymously; but then the ‘certain author who disgusted Boswell by his forwardness,’ mentioned just before Warton, may be Warton himself.
[1322] ‘When he arrived at Eton he could not make a verse; that is, he wanted a point indispensable with us to a certain rank in our system. But this wonderful boy, having satisfied the Master [Dr. Barnard] that he was an admirable scholar, and possessed of genius, was at once placed at the head of a form. He acquired the rules of Latin verse; tried his powers; and perceiving that he could not rise above his rivals in Virgil, Ovid, or the lyric of Horace, he took up the sermoni propiora, and there overshadowed all competitors. In the following lines he describes the hammer of the auctioneer with a mock sublimity which turns Horace into Virgil:—
‘Jam-jamque cadit, celerique recursu
Erigitur, lapsum retrahens, perque aera nutat.’
Nichols’s Lit. Anec. viii. 547.
Horace Walpole wrote of him in Sept. 1765 (Letters, iv. 411):—‘He is a very extraordinary young man for variety of learning. He is rather too wise for his age, and too fond of showing it; but when he has seen more of the world, he will choose to know less.’ He died at Rome in the following year. Hume, on hearing the news, wrote to Adam Smith:—‘Were you and I together, dear Smith, we should shed tears at present for the death of poor Sir James Macdonald. We could not possibly have suffered a greater loss than in that valuable young man.’ J. H. Burton’s Hume, ii. 349. See Boswell’s Hebrides, Sept. 5, 1773.
[1323] Boswell says that Macdonald had for Johnson ‘a great terrour.’ (Boswelliana, p. 216.) Northcote (Life of Reynolds, i. 329) says:—‘It is a fact that a certain nobleman, an intimate friend of Reynolds, had strangely conceived in his mind such a formidable idea of all those persons who had gained great fame as literary characters, that I have heard Sir Joshua say, he verily believed he could no more have prevailed upon this noble person to dine at the same table with Johnson and Goldsmith than with two tigers.’ According to Mr. Seward (Biographiana, p. 600), Mrs. Cotterell having one day asked Dr. Johnson to introduce her to a celebrated writer, ‘Dearest madam,’ said he, ‘you had better let it alone; the best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.’ Mr. Seward refers to The Rambler, No. 14, where Johnson says that ‘there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an authour and his writings.’
[1324] See post, Jan. 19, 1775. In his Hebrides (p. i) Boswell writes:—‘When I was at Ferney, in 1764, I mentioned our design to Voltaire. He looked at me as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, “You do not insist on my accompanying you?” “No, Sir.” “Then I am very willing you should go.”’
[1325] ‘When he went through the streets he desired to have one to lead him by the hand. They asked his opinion of the high church. He answered that it was a large rock, yet there were some in St. Kilda much higher, but that these were the best caves he ever saw; for that was the idea which he conceived of the pillars and arches upon which the church stands.’ M. Martin’s Western Isles, p. 297. Mr. Croker compares the passage in The Spectator (No. 50), in which an Indian king is made to say of St. Paul’s:—‘It was probably at first an huge misshapen rock that grew upon the top of the hill, which the natives of the country (after having cut it into a kind of regular figure) bored and hollowed with incredible pains and industry.’
[1326] Boswell, writing to Temple the next day, slightly varies these words:—‘He said, “My dear Boswell, it would give me great pain to part with you, if I thought we were not to meet again.”’ Letters of Boswell, p. 34.
[1327] Gibbon (Misc. Works, i. 43) protests against ‘the trite and lavish praise of the happiness of our boyish years, which is echoed with so much affectation in the world. That happiness I have never known, that time I have never regretted. The poet may gaily describe the short hours of recreation; but he forgets the daily tedious labours of the school, which is approached each morning with anxious and reluctant steps.’ See ante, p. 44, and post, under Feb. 27, 1772.
[1328] About fame Gibbon felt much as Johnson did. ‘I am disgusted,’ he wrote (ib. 272), ‘with the affectation of men of letters, who complain that they have renounced a substance for a shadow, and that their fame (which sometimes is no insupportable weight) affords a poor compensation for envy, censure, and persecution. My own experience, at least, has taught me a very different lesson; twenty happy years have been animated by the labour of my History, and its success has given me a name, a rank, a character, in the world, to which I should not otherwise have been entitled.’
[1329] See ante, p. 432.
[1330] See ante, p. 332.
[1331] This opinion was given by him more at large at a subsequent period. See Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 3rd edit. p. 32 [Aug. 16]. BOSWELL. ‘That Swift was its author, though it be universally believed, was never owned by himself, nor very well proved by any evidence; but no other claimant can be produced, and he did not deny it when Archbishop Sharpe and the Duchess of Somerset, by showing it to the Queen, debarred him from a bishoprick.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 197. See also post, March 24, 1775. Stockdale records (Memoirs, ii. 61) that Johnson said ‘that if Swift really was the author of The Tale of the Tub, as the best of his other performances were of a very inferior merit, he
