14, 1773.
[414]
'Musis amicus, tristitiam et metus Tradam, &c.
While in the Muse's friendship blest, Nor fear, nor grief, shall break my rest; Bear them, ye vagrant winds, away, And drown them in the Cretan Sea.'
FRANCIS. Horace, Odes, i. 26. I.
[415] Horace. Odes, i. 22. 5.
[416] Lord Elibank wrote to Boswell two years later:--'Old as I am, I shall be glad to go five hundred miles to enjoy a day of Mr. Johnson's company.' Boswell's Hebrides under date of Sept. 12, 1773. See ib. Nov. 10, and post, April 5, 1776.
[417] Goldsmith wrote to Langton on Sept. 7, 1771:--'Johnson has been down upon a visit to a country parson, Doctor Taylor, and is returned to his old haunts at Mrs. Thrale's.' Goldsmith's Misc. Works, i. 93.
[418] While Miss Burney was examining a likeness of Johnson, 'he no sooner discerned it than he began see-sawing for a moment or two in silence; and then, with a ludicrous half-laugh, peeping over her shoulder, he called out:--"Ah, ha! Sam Johnson! I see thee!--and an ugly dog thou art!"' Memoirs of Dr. Burney, ii. 180. In another passage (p. 197), after describing 'the kindness that irradiated his austere and studious features into the most pleased and pleasing benignity,' as he welcomed her and her father to his house, she adds that a lady who was present often exclaimed, 'Why did not Sir Joshua Reynolds paint Dr. Johnson when he was speaking to Dr. Burney or to you?'
[419] 'Johnson,' wrote Beattie from London on Sept. 8 of this year, 'has been greatly misrepresented. I have passed several entire days with him, and found him extremely agreeable.' Beattie's Life, ed. 1824, p. 120.
[420] He was preparing the fourth edition, See post, March 23, 1772.
[421] 'Sept. 18, 1771, 9 at night. I am now come to my sixty-third year. For the last year I have been slowly recovering both from the violence of my last illness, and, I think, from the general disease of my life: ... some advances I hope have been made towards regularity. I have missed church since Easter only two Sundays.... But indolence and indifference has [sic] been neither conquered nor opposed.' Pr. and Med. p. 104.
[422] 'Let us search and try our ways.' Lamentations iii. 40.
[423] Pr. and Med. p. 101 [105]. BOSWELL.
[424] Boswell forgets the fourth edition of his Dictionary. Johnson, in Aug. 1771 (ante, p. 142), wrote to Langton:--'I am engaging in a very great work, the revision of my Dictionary.' In Pr. and Med. p. 123, at Easter, 1773, as he 'reviews the last year,' he records:--'Of the spring and summer I remember that I was able in those seasons to examine and improve my Dictionary, and was seldom withheld from the work but by my own unwillingness.'
[425] Thus translated by a friend:--
'In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove, This Goat, who twice the world had traversed round, Deserving both her masters care and love, Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.'
BOSWELL.
[426] Cockburn (Life of Jeffrey, i. 4) says that the High School of Edinburgh, in 1781, 'was cursed by two under master, whose atrocities young men cannot be made to believe, but old men cannot forget, and the criminal law would not now endure.'
[427] Mr. Langton married the Countess Dowager of Rothes. BOSWELL.
[428] From school. See ante, ii. 62.
[429] See ante, i. 44.
[430] Johnson used to say that schoolmasters were worse than the Egyptian task-masters of old. 'No boy,' says he, 'is sure any day he goes to school to escape a whipping. How can the schoolmaster tell what the boy has really forgotten, and what he has neglected to learn?' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 209. 'I rejoice,' writes J. S. Mill (Auto. p. 53), 'in the decline of the old, brutal, and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them.'
[431] See ante, i. 373.
[432] See ante, ii. 74.
[433] The ship in which Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander were to have sailed was the Endeavour. It was, they said, unfit for the voyage. The Admiralty altered it in such a way as to render it top-heavy. It was nearly overset on going down the river. Then it was rendered safe by restoring it to its former condition. When the explorers raised their former objections, they were told to take it or none. Ann. Reg. xv. 108. See also Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 18, 1773.
[434] I suspect that Raleigh is here an error of Mr. Boswell's pen for Drake. CROKER. Johnson had written Drake's Life, and therefore must have had it well in mind that it was Drake who went round the world.
[435] Romeo and Juliet, act v. sc. 1.
[436] 'TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ.
'Edinburgh, May 3, 1792.
'MY DEAR SIR,
'As I suppose your great work will soon be reprinted, I beg leave to trouble you with a remark on a passage of it, in which I am a little misrepresented. Be not alarmed; the misrepresentation is not imputable to you. Not having the book at hand, I cannot specify the page, but I suppose you will easily find it.