He took as the motto for the paper:
'O bone, ne te Frustrere, insanis et tu';
which he translates, 'My good friend, do not deceive thyself; for with all thy charity thou also art a silly fellow.' 'Giving our money to common beggars,' he describes as 'a kind of bounty that is a crime against the public.' Fielding's Works, x. 77, ed. 1806. Johnson once allowed (post, 1780, in Mr. Langton's Collection) that 'one might give away L500 a year to those that importune in the streets, and not do any good.' See also post, Oct. 10, 1779.
[347] He was once attacked, though whether by robbers is not made clear. See post, under Feb. 7, 1775.
[348] Perhaps it was this class of people which is described in the following passage:--'It was never against people of coarse life that his contempt was expressed, while poverty of sentiment in men who considered themselves to be company for the parlour, as he called it, was what he would not bear.' Piozzi's Anec. 215.
[349] See ante, i. 320, for one such offer.
[350] See ante, i. 163, note 1, and post, March 30, 1781.
[351] Dr. T. Campbell, in his Survey of the South of Ireland, ed. 1777 (post, April 5, 1775), says:--'By one law of the penal code, if a Papist have a horse worth fifty, or five hundred pounds, a Protestant may become the purchaser upon paying him down five. By another of the same code, a son may say to his father, "Sir, if you don't give me what money I want, I'll turn discoverer, and in spite of you and my elder brother too, on whom at marriage you settled your estate, I shall become heir,"' p. 251. Father O'Leary, in his Remarks on Wesley's Letter, published in 1780 (post, Hebrides, Aug. 15, 1773), says (p. 41):--'He has seen the venerable matron, after twenty-four years' marriage, banished from the perjured husband's house, though it was proved in open court that for six months before his marriage he went to mass. But the law requires that he should be a year and a day of the same religion.' Burke wrote in 1792: 'The Castle [the government in Dublin] considers the out-lawry (or what at least I look on as such) of the great mass of the people as an unalterable maxim in the government of Ireland.' Burke's Corres., iii. 378. See post, ii. 130, and May 7, 1773, and Oct. 12, 1779.
[352] See post, just before Feb. 18, 1775.
[353] 'Of Sheridan's writings on elocution, Johnson said, they were a continual renovation of hope, and an unvaried succession of disappointments.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 197. See post, May 17, 1783.
[354] In 1753, Jonas Hanway published his Travels to Persia.
[355] 'Though his journey was completed in eight days he gave a relation of it in two octavo volumes.' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 352. See ante, i. 313.
[356] See ante, i. 68, and post, June 9, 1784, note, where he varies the epithet, calling it 'the best piece of parenetic divinity.'
[357] '"I taught myself," Law tells us, "the high Dutch language, on purpose to know the original words of the blessed Jacob."' Overton's Life of Law, p. 181. Behmen, or Boehme, the mystic shoemaker of Gorlitz, was born in 1575, and died in 1624. 'His books may not hold at all honourable places in libraries; his name may be ridiculous. But he was a generative thinker. What he knew he knew for himself. It was not transmitted to him, but fought for.' F.D. Maurice's Moral and Meta. Phil. ii. 325. Of Hudibras's squire, Ralph, it was said:
'He Anthroposophus, and Floud, And Jacob Behmen understood.'
Hudibras, I. i. 541.
Wesley (Journal, i. 359) writes of Behmen's Mysteriun Magnum, 'I can and must say thus much (and that with as full evidence as I can say two and two make four) it is most sublime nonsense, inimitable bombast, fustian not to be paralleled.'
[358] 'He heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter,' 2 Corinthians, xii. 4.
[359] See ante, i. 458. In Humphry Clinker, in the Letter of June 11, the turnkey of Clerkenwell Prison thus speaks of a Methodist:--'I don't care if the devil had him; here has been nothing but canting and praying since the fellow entered the place. Rabbit him! the tap will be ruined--we han't sold a cask of beer nor a dozen of wine, since he paid his garnish--the gentlemen get drunk with nothing but your damned religion.'
[360] 'John Wesley probably paid more for turnpikes than any other man in England, for no other person travelled so much.' Southey's Wesley, i. 407. 'He tells us himself, that he preached about 800 sermons in a year.' Ib ii. 532. In one of his Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion, he asks:--'Can you bear the summer sun to beat upon your naked head? Can you suffer the wintry rain or wind, from whatever quarter it blows? Are you able to stand in the open air, without any covering or defence, when God casteth abroad his snow like wool, or scattereth his hoar-frost like ashes? And yet these are some of the smallest inconveniences which accompany field-preaching. For beyond all these, are the contradiction of sinners, the scoffs both of the great vulgar and the small; contempt and reproach of every kind--often more than verbal affronts--stupid, brutal violence, sometimes to the hazard of health, or limbs, or life.