Voltaire."' Walpole's Letters, vi. 394. Her own Letters are very pompous and very poor, and her wit would not seem to have flashed often; for Miss Burney wrote of her:--'She reasons well, and harangues well, but wit she has none.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 335. Yet in this same Diary (i. 112) we find evidence of the absurdly high estimate that was commonly formed of her. 'Mrs. Thrale asked me if I did not want to see Mrs. Montagu. I truly said, I should be the most insensible of all animals not to like to see our sex's glory.' That she was a very extraordinary woman we have Johnson's word for it. (See post, May 15, 1784.) It is impossible, however, to discover anything that rises above commonplace in anything that she wrote, and, so far as I know, that she said, with the exception of her one saying about Voltaire. Johnson himself, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, has a laugh at her. He had mentioned Shakespeare, nature and friendship, and continues:--'Now, of whom shall I proceed to speak? Of whom but Mrs. Montagu? Having mentioned Shakespeare and Nature, does not the name of Montagu force itself upon me? Such were the transitions of the ancients, which now seem abrupt, because the intermediate idea is lost to modern understandings. I wish her name had connected itself with friendship; but, ah Colin, thy hopes are in vain.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 101. See post, April 7, 1778.
[267] 'Reynolds is fond of her book, and I wonder at it; for neither I, nor Beauclerk, nor Mrs. Thrale, could get through it.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 23, 1773.
[268] Lord Kames is 'the Scotchman.' See ante, i. 393.
[269] 'When Charles Townshend read some of Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism, he said:--"This is the work of a dull man grown whimsical"--a most characteristical account of Lord Kames as a writer.' Boswelliana, p. 278. Hume wrote of it:--'Some parts of the work are ingenious and curious; but it is too abstruse and crabbed ever to take with the public.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 131. 'Kames,' he says, 'had much provoked Voltaire, who never forgives, and never thinks any enemy below his notice.' Ib, p. 195. Voltaire (Works, xliii. 302) thus ridicules his book:--'Il nous prouve d'abord que nous avons cinq sens, et que nous sentons moins l'impression douce faite sur nos yeux et sur nos oreilles par les couleurs et par les sons que nous ne sentons un grand coup sur la jambe ou sur la tete.'
[270] L'Abbe Dubos, 1670-1742. 'Tous les artistes lisent avec fruit ses Reflexions sur la poesie, la peinture, et la musique. C'est le livre le plus utile qu'on ait jamais ecrit sur ces matieres chez aucune des nations de l'Europe.' Voltaire's Siecle de Louis XIV, i. 81.
[271] Bouhours, 1628-1702. Voltaire, writing of Bouhours' Maniere de bien penser sur les ouvrages d'esprit, says that he teaches young people 'a eviter l'enflure, l'obscurite, le recherche, et le faux.' Ib, p. 54. Johnson, perhaps, knew him, through The Spectator, No. 62, where it is said that he has shown 'that it is impossible for any thought to be beautiful which is not just, ... that the basis of all wit is truth.'
[272] Macbeth, act iii. sc. 2.
[273] In The False Alarm, that was published less than three months after this conversation, Johnson describes how petitions were got. 'The progress of a petition is well known. An ejected placeman goes down to his county or his borough, tells his friends of his inability to serve them, and his constituents of the corruption of the Government. His friends readily understand that he who can get nothing will have nothing to give. They agree to proclaim a meeting; meat and drink are plentifully provided, a crowd is easily brought together, and those who think that they know the reason of their meeting, undertake to tell those who know it not; ale and clamour unite their powers.... The petition is read, and universally approved. Those who are sober enough to write, add their names, and the rest would sign it if they could.' Works, vi. 172. Yet, when the petitions for Dr. Dodd's life were rejected, Johnson said:--'Surely the voice of the public when it calls so loudly, and calls only for mercy, ought to be heard.' Post, June 28, 1777. Horace Walpole, writing of the numerous petitions presented to the King this year (1769), blames 'an example so inconsistent with the principles of liberty, as appealing to the Crown against the House of Commons.' Some of them prayed for a dissolution of Parliament. Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iii. 382, 390. Two years earlier Lord Shelburne, when Secretary of State, had found among the subscribers to a petition for his impeachment, a friend of his, a London alderman. 'Oh! aye,' said the alderman when asked for an explanation, 'I did sign a petition at the Royal Exchange, which they told me was for the impeachment of a Minister; I always sign a petition to impeach a Minister, and I recollect that as soon as I had subscribed it, twenty more put their names to it.' Parl. Hist., xxxv. 167.
[274] See post, under March 24, 1776.