'The indecency and licentiousness of his behaviour drew upon him, Dec. 24, 1694, while he was yet only bachelor, a publick admonition, entered upon record, in order to his expulsion. Of this reproof the effect is not known. He was probably less notorious. At Oxford, as we all know, much will be forgiven to literary merit.... Of his lampoon upon Dean Aldrich, [Smith was a Christ-Church man], I once heard a single line too gross to be repeated. But he was still a genius and a scholar, and Oxford was unwilling to lose him; he was endured with all his pranks and his vices two years longer; but on Dec. 20, 1705, at the instance of all the Canons, the sentence declared five years before was put in execution. The execution was, I believe, silent and tender.' Works, vii. 373-4.
[548] See post, p. 193, note i.
[549] 'Our bottle-conversation,' wrote Addison, 'is infected with party-lying.' The Spectator, No. 507.
[550] Mrs. Piozzi, in her Anecdotes, p. 261, has given an erroneous account of this incident, as of many others. She pretends to relate it from recollection, as if she herself had been present; when the fact is that it was communicated to her by me. She has represented it as a personality, and the true point has escaped her. BOSWELL. She tells the story against Boswell. 'I fancy Mr. B---- has not forgotten,' she writes.
[551] See post, April 11, 1776.
[552] Johnson, in his Dictionary, defines manufacturer as a workman; an artificer.
[553] Johnson had no fear of popular education. In his attack on Jenyns's Enquiry (ante, i. 315), he wrote (Works, vi. 56):--'Though it should be granted that those who are born to poverty and drudgery should not be deprived by an improper education of the opiate of ignorance, even this concession will not be of much use to direct our practice, unless it be determined, who are those that are born to poverty. To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation, only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is in itself cruel, if not unjust.... I am always afraid of determining on the side of envy or cruelty. The privileges of education may sometimes be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to withhold them, lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy.' In The Idler, No. 26, he attacked those who 'hold it little less than criminal to teach poor girls to read and write,' and who say that 'they who are born to poverty are born to ignorance, and will work the harder the less they know.'
[554] Tacitus's Agricola, ch. xii, was no doubt quoted in reference to the shortness of the northern winter day.
[555] It is remarkable, that Lord Monboddo, whom, on account of his resembling Dr. Johnson in some particulars, Foote called an Elzevir edition of him, has, by coincidence, made the very same remark. Origin and Progress of Language, vol. iii. 2nd ed. p. 219. BOSWELL. See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 21, note.
[556] On Saturday night Johnson recorded:--'I resolved last Easter to read within the year the whole Bible, a very great part of which I had never looked upon. I read the Greek Testament without construing, and this day concluded the Apocalypse.... Easter Day. After twelve at night. The day is now begun on which I hope to begin a new course, [Greek: hosper aph husplaeggon], [as if from the starting-place.]
My hopes are from this time-- To rise early, To waste less time, To appropriate something to charity.'
A week later he recorded:--'It is a comfort to me that at last, in my sixty-third year, I have attained to know even thus hastily, confusedly, and imperfectly, what my Bible contains. I have never yet read the Apocrypha. I have sometimes looked into the Maccabees, and read a chapter containing the question, Which is the strongest? I think, in Esdras' [I Esdras, ch. iii. v. 10]. Pr. and Med. pp. 112-118.
[557] Pr. and Med. p. iii. BOSWELL.
[558] 'Perfect through sufferings.' Hebrews, ii. 10.
[559] 'I was always so incapable of learning mathematics,' wrote Horace Walpole (Letters, ix. 467), 'that I could not even get by heart the multiplication table, as blind Professor Sanderson honestly told me, above three-score years ago, when I went to his lectures at Cambridge. After the first fortnight he said to me, "Young man, it would be cheating you to take your money; for you never can learn what I am trying to teach you." I was exceedingly mortified, and cried; for, being a Prime Minister's son, I had firmly believed all the flattery with which I had been assured that my parts were capable of anything.'
[560] Reynolds said:--'Out of the great number of critics in this metropolis who all pretend to knowledge in pictures, the greater part must be mere pretenders only. Taste does not come by chance; it is a long and laborious task to acquire it.' Northcote's Reynolds, i. 264.
[561] 'Jemmy Boswell,' wrote John Scott (afterwards Lord Eldon), 'called upon me, desiring to know what would be my definition of taste. I told him I must decline defining it, because I knew he would publish it.