Johnson had intended to continue them, for he writes:--'We shall here suspend our narrative.' Ib. vi. 474.
[903] See ante, p. 221.
[904] The sentence continues:--'and produce heirs to the father's habiliments.' Ib. vi. 436. Another instance may be adduced of his Brownism in the following line:--'The war continued in an equilibration by alternate losses and advantages.' Ib 473.
[905] In a letter from the Secretary of the Tall Club in The Guardian, No. 108. 'If the fair sex look upon us with an eye of favour, we shall make some attempts to lengthen out the human figure, and restore it to its ancient procerity.'
[906] See post, March 23, 1783.
[907] 'As power is the constant and unavoidable consequence of learning, there is no reason to doubt that the time is approaching when the Americans shall in their turn have some influence on the affairs of mankind, for literature apparently gains ground among them. A library is established in Carolina and some great electrical discoveries were made at Philadelphia...The fear that the American colonies will break off their dependence on England I have always thought chimerical and vain ... They must be dependent, and if they forsake us, or be forsaken by us, must fall into the hands of France.' Literary Magazine, pp. 293, 299.
[908] Johnson, I have no doubt, wrote the Review of A True Account of Lisbon since the Earthquake, in which it is stated that the destruction was grossly exaggerated. After quoting the writer at length, he concludes:--'Such then is the actual, real situation of that place which once was Lisbon, and has been since gazetically and pamphletically quite destroyed, consumed, annihilated! Now, upon comparing this simple narration of things and facts with the false and absurd accounts which have rather insulted and imposed upon us than informed us, who but must see the enormous disproportion?... Exaggeration and the absurdities ever faithfully attached to it are inseparable attitudes of the ignorant, the empty, and the affected. Hence those eloquent tropes so familiar in every conversation, monstrously pretty, vastly little; ... hence your eminent shoe-maker, farriers, and undertakers.... It is to the same muddy source we owe the many falsehoods and absurdities we have been pestered with concerning Lisbon. Thence your extravagantly sublime figures: Lisbon is no more; can be seen no more, etc., ... with all the other prodigal effusions of bombast beyond that stretch of time or temper to enumerate. Ib. p. 22. See post, under March 30, 1778.
[909] In the original undigested.
[910] Johnson's Works, vi. 113.
[911] In the spring of 1784, after the king had taken advantage of Fox's India Bill to dismiss the Coalition Ministry. See post, March 28, 1784.
[912] In Ireland there was no act to limit the duration of parliament. One parliament sat through the whole reign of George II--thirty-three years. Dr. Lucas, a Dublin physician, in attacking other grievances, attacked also this. In 1749 he would have been elected member for Dublin, had he not, on a charge of seditious writings, been committed by the House of Commons to prison. He was to be confined, he was told, 'in the common hall of the prison among the felons.' He fled to England, which was all that the government wanted, and he practised as a physician in London. In 1761 he was restored to the liberties of the City of Dublin and was also elected one of its members. Hardy's Lord Charlemont, i. 249, 299; and Gent. Mag., xx. 58 and xxxi. 236.
[913] Boswell himself falls into this 'cant.' See post, Sept. 23, 1777.
[914] Johnson's Works, vi. II.
[915] Ib. p. 13. He vigorously attacks the style in which these 'Memoirs' are written. 'Sometimes,' he writes, 'the reader is suddenly ravished with a sonorous sentence, of which, when the noise is past, the meaning does not long remain.' Ib. p. 15.
[916] The author of Friendship in Death.
[917] In the Lives of the Poets (Works, viii. 383) Johnson writes:--'Dr Watts was one of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the graces of language. Whatever they had among them before, whether of learning or acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by coarseness and inelegance of style. He showed them that zeal and purity might be expressed and enforced by polished diction.'
[918] 'Such he [Dr. Watts] was as every Christian Church would rejoice to have adopted.' Ib. p. 380. See also post, July 7, 1777, and May 19, 1778.
[919] Johnson's Works, vi. 79.
[920] Mr. Hanway would have had the support of Johnson's father, who, as his son writes, 'considered tea as very expensive, and discouraged my mother from keeping company with the neighbours, and from paying visits or receiving them. She lived to say, many years after, that if the time were to pass again, she would not comply with such unsocial injunctions.' Account of Johnson's Early Life, p. 18. The Methodists, ten years earlier than Hanway, had declared war on tea. 'After talking largely with both the men and women Leaders,' writes Wesley, 'we agreed it would prevent great expense, as well of health as of time and of money, if the poorer people of our society could be persuaded to leave off drinking of tea.' Wesley's Journal, i.