206.
[401] This softening was made in the later copies of the first edition. A second change seems to have been made. In the text, as given in Murphy's edition (1796, viii. 137), the last line of the passage stands:--'If he was sometimes wrong, he was often right.' Horace Walpole describes Grenville's 'plodding, methodic genius, which made him take the spirit of detail for ability.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 36. For the fine character that Burke drew of him see Payne's Burke, i. 122. There is, I think, a hit at Lord Bute's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir F. Dashwood (Lord Le Despencer), who was described as 'a man to whom a sum of five figures was an impenetrable secret.' Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 172, note. He himself said, 'People will point at me, and cry, "there goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared."' Ib p. 250.
[402] Boswell, I suspect, quoted this passage from hearsay, for originally it stood:--'If he could have got the money, he could have counted it' (p. 68). In the British Museum there are copies of the first edition both softened and unsoftened.
[403] Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland's Islands. BOSWELL.
[404] By comparing the first with the subsequent editions, this curious circumstance of ministerial authorship may be discovered. BOSWELL.
[405] Navigation was the common term for canals, which at that time were getting rapidly made. A writer in Notes and Queries, 6th, xi. 64, shows that Langton, as payment of a loan, undertook to pay Johnson's servant, Frank, an annuity for life, secured on profits from the navigation of the River Wey in Surrey.
[406] It was, Mr. Chalmers told me, a saying about that time, 'Married a Countess Dowager of Rothes!' 'Why, everybody marries a Countess Dowager of Rothes!' And there were in fact, about 1772, three ladies of that name married to second husbands. CROKER. Mr. Langton married one of these ladies.
[407] The Hermit of Warkworth: A Ballad in three cantos. T. Davis, 25. 6d. Cradock (Memoirs, i. 207) quotes Johnson's parody on a stanza in The Hermit:
'I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man With his hat in his hand.'
'Mr. Garrick,' he continues, 'asked me whether I had seen Johnson's criticism on the Hermit. "It is already," said he, "over half the town."'
[408] '"I am told," says a letter-writer of the day, "that Dr. Goldsmith now generally lives with his countryman, Lord Clare, who has lost his only son, Colonel Nugent."' Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 228. 'The Haunch of Venison was written this year (1771), and appears to have been written for Lord Clare alone; nor was it until two years after the writer's death that it obtained a wider audience than his immediate circle of friends.' Ib p. 230. See post, April 17, 1778.
[409] Gibbon (Misc. Works, i. 222) mentions Mr. Strahan:--'I agreed upon easy terms with Mr. Thomas Cadell, a respectable bookseller, and Mr. William Strahan, an eminent printer, and they undertook the care and risk of the publication [of the Decline and Fall], which derived more credit from the name of the shop than from that of the author.... So moderate were our hopes, that the original impression had been stinted to five hundred, till the number was doubled by the prophetic taste of Mr. Strahan.' Hume, by his will, left to Strahan's care all his manuscripts, 'trusting,' he says, 'to the friendship that has long subsisted between us for his careful and faithful execution of my intentions.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 494. See ib. p. 512, for a letter written to Hume on his death-bed by Strahan.
[410] Dr. Franklin, writing of the year 1773, says (Memoirs, i. 398):--'An acquaintance (Mr. Strahan, M.P.) calling on me, after having just been at the Treasury, showed me what he styled a pretty thing, for a friend of his; it was an order for L150, payable to Dr. Johnson, said to be one half of his yearly pension.'
[411] See post, July 27, 1778.
[412] Hawkins (Life, p. 513) says that Mr. Thrale made the same attempt. 'He had two meetings with the ministry, who at first seemed inclined to find Johnson a seat.' 'Lord Stowell told me,' says Mr. Croker, 'that it was understood amongst Johnson's friends that Lord North was afraid that Johnson's help (as he himself said of Lord Chesterfield's) might have been sometimes embarrassing. "He perhaps thought, and not unreasonably," added Lord Stowell, "that, like the elephant in the battle, he was quite as likely to trample down his friends as his foes."' Lord Stowell referred to Johnson's letter to Chesterfield (ante, i. 262), in which he describes a patron as 'one who encumbers a man with help.'
[413] Boswell married his cousin Margaret Montgomerie on Nov. 25, 1769. On the same day his father married for the second time. Scots Mag. for 1769, p. 615. Boswell, in his Letter to the People of Scotland (p. 55), published in 1785, describes his wife as 'a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, whom I love, after fifteen years, as on the day when she gave me her hand.' See his Hebrides, Aug.