For his History, see ante, ii. 37.
[646] Johnson has an interesting paper 'on lying' in The Adventurer, No. 50, which thus begins:--'When Aristotle was once asked what a man could gain by uttering falsehoods, he replied, "Not to be credited when he shall tell the truth."'
[647] Johnson speaks of the past, for Sterne had been dead five years. Gray wrote on April 22, 1760:--'Tristram Shandy is still a greater object of admiration, the man as well as the book. One is invited to dinner where he dines a fortnight beforehand.' Gray's Works, ed. 1858, iii. 241.
[648] 'I was but once,' said Johnson, 'in Sterne's company, and then his only attempt at merriment consisted in his display of a drawing too indecently gross to have delighted even in a brothel.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 214.
[649] Townshend was not the man to make his jokes serve twice. Horace Walpole said of his Champagne Speech,--'It was Garrick writing and acting extempore scenes of Congreve.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iii. 25. Sir G. Colebrooke says:--'When Garrick and Foote were present he took the lead, and hardly allowed them an opportunity of shewing their talents of mimicry, because he could excel them in their own art.' Ib p. 101, note. '"Perhaps," said Burke, "there never arose in this country, nor in any country, a man of a more pointed and finished wit."' Payne's Burke, i. 146.
[650] The 'eminent public character' is no doubt Burke, and the friend, as Mr. Croker suggests, probably Reynolds. See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 15, 1773, for a like charge made by Johnson against Burke. Boswell commonly describes Burke as 'an eminent friend of ours;' but he could not do so as yet, for he first met him fifteen days later. (Post, April 30.)
[651] 'Party,' Burke wrote in 1770 (Thoughts on the Present Discontents), 'is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part I find it impossible to conceive that any one believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice.' Payne's Burke, i. 86.
[652] On May 5, and again on Nov. 10, the play was commanded by the King and Queen. Prior's Goldsmith, ii. 394.
[653] Absalom and Achitophel, part i. l. 872.
[654] Paoli perhaps was thinking of himself. While he was still 'the successful rebel' in Corsica, he had said to Boswell:--'The arts and sciences are like dress and ornament. You cannot expect them from us for some time. But come back twenty or thirty years hence, and we'll shew you arts and sciences.' Boswell's Corsica, p.172.
[655] 'The Duke of Cumberland had been forbidden the Court on his marriage with Mrs. Horton, a year before; but on the Duke of Gloucester's avowal of his marriage with Lady Waldegrave, the King's indignation found vent in the Royal Marriage Act: which was hotly opposed by the Whigs as an edict of tyranny. Goldsmith (perhaps for Burke's sake) helped to make it unpopular with the people: "We'll go to France", says Hastings to Miss Neville, "for there, even among slaves, the laws of marriage are respected." Said on the first night this had directed repeated cheering to the Duke of Gloucester, who sat in one of the boxes.' Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 358. See ante, ii. 152.
[656] Stenography, by John Angell, 1758.
[657] See post, April 10, 1778.
[658] See ante, ii.
[659] James Harris, father of the first Earl of Malmesbury, born 1709, died 1780. Two years later Boswell wrote to Temple: 'I am invited to a dinner at Mr. Cambridge's (for the dinner, see post, April 18, 1773), where are to be Reynolds, Johnson, and Hermes Harris. "Do you think so?" said he. "Most certainly, said I." Do you remember how I used to laugh at his style when we were in the Temple? He thinks himself an ancient Greek from these little peculiarities, as the imitators of Shakspeare, whom the Spectator mentions, thought they had done wonderfully when they had produced a line similar:--
"And so, good morrow to ye, good Master Lieutenant."'
Letters of Boswell, p.187. It is not in the Spectator, but in Martinus Scriblerus, ch. ix. (Swift's Works, 1803, xxiii, 53), that the imitators of Shakspeare are ridiculed. Harris got his name of Hermes from his Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar. Cradock (Memoirs, i, 208) says that, 'A gentleman applied to his friend to lend him some amusing book, and he recommended Harris's Hermes. On returning it, the other asked how he had been entertained. "Not much," he replied; "he thought that all these imitations of Tristram Shandy fell far short of the original."' See post, April 7, 1778, and Boswell's Hebrides, Nov. 3, 1773.
[660] Johnson suffers, in Cowper's epitaph on him, from the same kind of praise as Goldsmith gives Harris:--
'Whose verse may claim, grave, masculine and strong, Superior praise to the mere poet's song.'
Cowper's Works, v. 119.
[661] See ante, 210.
[662] Cave set up his coach about thirty years earlier (ante, i, 152, note).