1766. Etat. 57. Dr. Johnson at the fame time favoured me by marking the lines which he furnished to Goldsmith's " Deserted Village," which are only the four last : "That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, Talking of education, "People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot fee that lectures can do fo much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures. You might teach making of shoes by lectures!" At night I fupped with him at the Mitre tavern, that we might renew our focial intimacy at the original place of meeting. But there was now a confiderable difference in his way of living. Having had an illness, in which he was advised to leave off wine, he had, from that period, continued to abstain from it, and drank only water, or lemonade. I told him that a foreign friend of his, whom I had met with abroad, was so wretchedly perverted to infidelity, that he treated the hopes of immortality with brutal levity; and faid, "As man dies like a dog, let him lie like a dog." JOHNSON. " If he dies like a dog, let him lie like a dog." I added, that this man faid to me, " I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am." JOHNSON. " Sir, he must be very fingular in his opinion, if he thinks himself one of the best of men; for none of his friends think him so." He said, "No honeft man could be a Deist; for no man could be fo after a fair examination of the proofs of Chriftianity." I named Hume. JOHNSON. "No, Sir; Hume owned to a clergyman in the bishoprick of Durham, that he had never read the New Testament with attention." I mentioned Hume's notion, that all who are happy are equally happy; a little miss with a new gown at a dancing-fchool ball, a general at the head of a victorious army, and an orator, after having made an eloquent speech in a great assembly. JOHNSON. "Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally fatisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable confcioufnefs. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher." I remember this very question very happily illustrated in opposition to Hume, خصو THE LIFE OF DR. JOHNSON. Hume, by the Reverend Mr. Robert Brown, at Utrecht. 277 1766. " A small drinking glafs and a large one, (faid he,) may be equally full; but the large one holds Etat. 57. more than the small." "You have now Dr. Johnson was very kind this evening, and said to me, "Alas, lived five-and-twenty years, and you have employed them well." Do I know history? Do I know mathematicks ? Sir, (faid I,) I fear not. Do I know law?" JOHNSON. "Why, Sir, though you may know no science so well as to be able to teach it, and no profession so well as to be able to follow it, your general mass of knowledge of books and men renders you very capable to make yourself master of any science, or fit yourself for any profession." I mentioned that a gay friend had advised me against being a lawyer, because I should be excelled by plodding blockheads. JOHNSON. "Why, Sir, in the formulary and statutory part of law, a plodding blockhead may excel; but in the ingenious and rational part of it a plodding blockhead can never excel." I talked of the mode adopted by some to rife in the world, by courting great men, and afsked him whether he had ever submitted to it. JOHNSON. "Why, Sir, I never was near enough to great men to court them. You may be prudently attached to great men, and yet independent. You are not to do what you think wrong; and, Sir, you are to calculate and not pay too dear for what you get. You must not give a fhilling's worth of court for fix-pence worth of good. But if you can get a fhilling's worth of good for fix-pence worth of court, you are a fool if you do not pay court." He faid, "If convents should be allowed at all, they should only be retreats for persons unable to serve the publick, or who have served it. It is our first duty to serve society, and, after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the falvation of our own fouls. A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged." I introduced the fubject of fecond fight, and other mysterious manifestations; the fulfilment of which, I suggested might happen by chance. JOHNSON. "Yes, Sir; but they have happened so often, that mankind have agreed to think them not fortuitous." I talked to him a great deal of what I had seen in Corsica, and of my intention to publish an account of it. He encouraged me by faying, "You cannot go to the bottom of the subject; but all that you tell us will be new to Give us as many anecdotes as you can." Our next meeting at the Mitre was on Saturday the 15th of February, when I presented to him my old and most intimate friend, the Reverend Mr. Temple, us. then 57. 1766. then of Cambridge. I having mentioned that I had passed some time with Etat.. Rousseau in his wild retreat, and having quoted some remark made by Mr. Wilkes, with whom I had spent many pleasant hours in Italy, Johnson said, (farcaftically,) " It seems, Sir, you have kept very good company abroad, Rousseau and Wilkes!" Thinking it enough to defend one at a time, I faid nothing as to my gay friend, but answered with a smile, "My dear Sir, you don't call Roufsseau bad company. Do you really think him a bad man?" JOHNSON. "Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don't talk with you. If you mean to be ferious, I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be hunted out of fociety, as he has been. Three or four nations have expelled him; and it is a shame that he is protected in this country." BOSWELL. " I don't deny, Sir, but that his novel may, perhaps, do harm; but I cannot think his intention was bad." JOHNSON. "Sir, that will not do. We cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him; but the Judge will order you to be hanged. An alledged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice. Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would fooner sign a fentence for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations." BOSWELL. "Sir, do you think him as bad a man as Voltaire?" JOHNSON. "Why, Sir, it is difficult to fettle the proportion of iniquity between them." This violence feemed very strange to me, who had read many of Rousseau's animated writings with great pleasure, and even edification, had been much pleased with his society, and was just come from the Continent, where he was very generally admired. Nor can I yet allow that he deferves the very fevere censure which Johnson pronounced upon him. His absurd preference of savage to civilised life, and other fingularities, are proofs rather of a defect in his understanding, than of any depravity in his heart. And notwithstanding the unfavourable opinion which many worthy men have expressed of his " Profeffion de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard," I cannot help admiring it as the performance of a man full of fincere reverential fubmiffion to Divine Mystery, though beset with perplexing doubts; a state of mind to be viewed with pity rather than with anger. On his favourite fubject of fubordination, Johnfon faid, "So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident fuperiority over the other." I mentioned { I mentioned the advice given us by philosophers, to confole ourselves, when 1766. distressed or embarrassed, by thinking of those who are in a worse situation Ætat. 57. than ourselves. This, I observed, could not apply to all, for there must be some who have nobody worse than they are. JOHNSON. "Why to be fure, Sir, there are; but they don't know it. There is no being so poor and fo contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible." As my stay in London at this time was very short, I had not many opportunities of being with Dr. Johnson; but I felt my veneration for him in no degree lessened, by my having seen multorum hominum mores et urbes. On the contrary, by having it in my power to compare him with many of the most celebrated persons of other countries, my admiration of his extraordinary mind was increased and confirmed. The roughness, indeed, which sometimes appeared in his manners, was more striking to me now, from my having been accustomed to the studied smooth complying habits of the Continent; and I clearly recognised in him, not without respect for his honest confcientious zeal, the fame indignant and farcastical mode of treating every attempt to unhinge or weaken good principles. One evening, when a young gentleman teized him with an account of the infidelity of his fervant, who, he said, would not believe the fcriptures, because he could not read them in the original tongues, and be fure that they were not invented. "Why, foolish fellow, (faid Johnson,) has he any better authority for almost every thing that he believes?"-" Then the vulgar, Sir, never can know they are right, but must submit themselves to the learned."JOHNSON. "To be fure, Sir. The vulgar are the children of the state, and must be taught like children."-" Then, Sir, a poor Turk must be a Mahometan, just as a poor Englishman must be a Christian?"-JOHNSON. "Why yes, Sir; and what then? This now is such stuff as I used to talk to my mother, when I first began to think myself a clever fellow; and she ought to have whipt me for it." Another evening Dr. Goldsmith and I called on him, with the hope of prevailing on him to sup with us at the Mitre. We found him indisposed, and refolved not to go abroad. "Come then, (faid Goldsmith,) we will not go to the Mitre to-night, since we cannot have the big man with us." Johnson then called for a bottle of port, of which Goldsmith and I partook, while our friend, now a water drinker fat by us. GOLDSMITH. " I think, Mr. Johnson, you don't go near the theatres now. You give yourself no more concern about a new play, 4 1766. play, than if you had never had any thing to do with the stage." JOHNSON. Ætat. 57. "Why, Sir, our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child's rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man's whore." GOLDSMITH. "Nay, Sir; but your Muse was not a whore." JOHNSON. "Sir, I do not think she was. But as we advance in the journey of life, we drop fome of the things which have pleased us; whether it be that we are fatigued and don't choose to carry so many things any farther, or that we find BOSWELL. "But, Sir, why don't you give GOLDSMITH, "Ay, Sir, we have a claim I am not obliged to do any more. No other things which we like better." He talked of making verses, and observed, "The great difficulty is to know when you have made good ones. When compofing, I have generally had them in my mind, perhaps fifty at a time, walking up and down in my room; and then I have wrote them down, and often, from laziness, have written only half lines. I have written a hundred lines in a day. I remember I wrote a hundred lines of "The Vanity of human Wishes" in a day. Doctor, (turning to Goldsmith,) I am not quite idle; I made one line t'other day; but I made no more." GOLDSMITH. "Let us hear it; we'll put a bad one to it." JOHNSON. "No, Sir; I have forgot it." Such specimens of the easy and playful conversation of the great Dr. Samuel Johnson are, I think, to be prized; as exhibiting the little varieties of a mind so enlarged and so powerful when objects of consequence required its exertions, and as giving us a minute knowledge of his character and modes of thinking. After I had been some time in Scotland, I mentioned to him in a letter that "On my first return to my native country, after some years of abfence, I was told of a vast number of my acquaintance who were all gone to the land of forgetfulness, and I found myself like a man stalking over a field of battle, who every moment perceives some one lying dead." I complained of irresolution, and : |