[465] 'Plain truth, dear Murray, needs no flowers of speech.' Pope thus addresses him in Epistle vi. Book i. of his Imitations of Horace, which he dedicated to him.
[466] See ante, 386.
[467] See post, March 23, 1776.
[468] Afterwards Lord Ashburton. Described by Johnson (post, July 22, 1777), as 'Mr. Dunning, the great lawyer.'
[469] 'Having cleared his tongue from his native pronunciation, so as to be no longer distinguished as a Scot, he seems inclined to disencumber himself from all adherences of his original, and took upon him to change his name from Scotch Malloch to English Mallet, without any imaginable reason of preference which the eye or ear can discover. What other proofs he gave of disrespect to his native country I know not, but it was remarked of him that he was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend.' Johnson's Works, viii. 464. See ante, i. 268, and post, April 28, 1783.
[470] Mr. Love was, so far as is known, the first who advised Boswell to keep a journal. When Boswell was but eighteen, writing of a journey he had taken, he says: 'I kept an exact journal, at the particular desire of my friend, Mr. Love, and sent it to him in sheets every post.' Letters of Boswell, p. 8.
[471] 'That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.' Hamlet, iii. 2.
[472] Jeffrey wrote from Oxford, where he spent nine months in 1791-2:--'The only part of a Scotchman I mean to abandon is the language, and language is all I expect to learn in England.' (Cockburn's Jeffrey, i. 46). His biographer says:--'He certainly succeeded in the abandonment of his habitual Scotch. The change was so sudden and so complete, that it excited the surprise of his friends, and furnished others with ridicule for many years.... The result, on the whole, was exactly as described by Lord Holland, who said that though Jeffrey "had lost the broad Scotch at Oxford, he had only gained the narrow English."' Cockburn, in forgetfulness of Mallet's case, says that 'the acquisition of a pure English accent by a full-grown Scotchman is fortunately impossible.'
[473] Henry Dundas, afterwards Viscount Melville. See post, under Nov. 29, 1777. Boswell wrote to Temple on May 22, 1775:--'Harry Dundas is going to be made King's Advocate--Lord Advocate at thirty-three! I cannot help being angry and somewhat fretful at this; he has, to be sure, strong parts, but he is a coarse, unlettered, unfanciful dog.' Letters of Boswell, p. 195. Horace Walpole describes him as 'the rankest of all Scotchmen, and odious for that bloody speech that had fixed on him the nick-name of Starvation! Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 479. On p. 637 he adds:--'The happily coined word "starvation" delivered a whole continent from the Northern harpies that meant to devour it.' The speech in which Dundas introduced starvation was made in 1775. Walpole's Letters, viii. 30. See Parl. Hist., xviii. 387. His character is drawn with great force by Cockburn. Life of Jeffrey, i. 77.
[474] The correspondent of Hume. See J. H. Burton's Hume, i. 320.
[475] See post, May 12, 1778.
[476] In the Plan (Works, v. 9), Johnson noticed the difference of the pronunciation of great. 'Some words have two sounds which may be equally admitted as being equally defensible by authority. Thus great is differently used:--
'For Swift and him despised the farce of state, The sober follies of the wise and great.'--POPE.
'As if misfortune made the throne her seat, And none could be unhappy but the great.'--ROWE.
In the Preface to the Dictionary (Works, v. 25), Johnson says that 'the vowels are capriciously pronounced, and differently modified by accident or affectation, not only in every province, but in every mouth.' Swift gives both rhymes within ten lines:--
'My lord and he are grown so great-- Always together, tete-a-tete.'
* * * * *
'You, Mr. Dean, frequent the great, Inform us, will the emperor treat?' Swift's Works (1803), x. 110.
[477] 'Dr. Henry More, of Cambridge, Johnson did not much affect; he was a Platonist, and, in Johnson's opinion, a visionary. He would frequently cite from him, and laugh at, a passage to this effect:--"At the consummation of all things, it shall come to pass that eternity shall shake hands with opacity"' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 543.
[478] See post, April 17, 1778, and May 19, 1784.
[479] See ante, i. 240, and ii. 105.
[480] Revelations, xiv. 2.
[481] Johnson, in The Rambler, No. 78, describes man's death as 'a change not only of the place, but the manner of his being; an entrance into a state not simply which he knows not, but which perhaps he has not faculties to know.'
[482] This fiction is known to have been invented by Daniel Defoe, and was added to Drelincourt's book, to make it sell. The first edition had it not. MALONE. 'More than fifty editions have not exhausted its popularity. The hundreds of thousands who have bought the silly treatise of Drelincourt have borne unconscious testimony to the genius of De Foe.' Forster's Essays, ii.