D'Arblay's Diary, i. 90.
[233] Pope, Essay on Man, ii. 2.
[234] Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale on May 14 (Tuesday):--'----goes away on Thursday, very well satisfied with his journey. Some great men have promised to obtain him a place, and then a fig for my father and his new wife.' Piozzi Letters, i. 324. He is writing no doubt of Boswell; yet, as Lord Auchinleck had been married more than six years, it is odd his wife should be called new. Boswell, a year earlier, wrote to Temple of his hopes from Lord Pembroke:--'How happy should I be to get an independency by my own influence while my father is alive!' Letters of Boswell, p. 182. Johnson, in a second letter to Mrs. Thrale, written two days after Boswell left, says:--'B---- went away on Thursday night, with no great inclination to travel northward; but who can contend with destiny? ... He carries with him two or three good resolutions; I hope they will not mould upon the road.' Piozzi Letters, i. 333.
[235] 1 Corinthians, xiii. 5.
[236] This passage, which is found in Act iii, is not in the acting copy of Douglas.
[237] Malone was one of these gentlemen. See post, under June 30, 1784. Reynolds, after saying that eagerness for victory often led Johnson into acts of rudeness, while 'he was not thus strenuous for victory with his intimates in tete-a-tete conversations when there were no witnesses,' adds:--'Were I to write the Life of Dr. Johnson I would labour this point, to separate his conduct that proceeded from his passions, and what proceeded from his reason, from his natural disposition seen in his quiet hours.' Taylor's Reynolds, ii. 462.
[238] These words must have been in the other copy. They are not in that which was preferred. BOSWELL.
[239] On June 3 he wrote that he was suffering from 'a very serious and troublesome fit of the gout. I enjoy all the dignity of lameness. I receive ladies and dismiss them sitting. Painful pre-eminence.' Piozzi Letters, i. 337. 'Painful pre-eminence' comes from Addison's Cato, act iii. sc. 5. Pope, in his Essay on Man, iv. 267, borrows the phrase:--
'Painful pre-eminence! yourself to view, Above life's weakness and its comforts too.'
It is humorously introduced into the Rolliad in the description of the Speaker:--
'There Cornewall sits, and oh! unhappy fate! Must sit for ever through the long debate. Painful pre-eminence! he hears, 'tis true, Fox, North, and Burke, but hears Sir Joseph too.'
[240] Dean Stanley (Memorials of Westminster Abbey, p. 297) says:-- 'One expression at least has passed from the inscription into the proverbial Latin of mankind--
"Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit."'
In a note he adds:--'Professor Conington calls my attention to the fact that, if this were a genuine classical expression, it would be ornaret. The slight mistake proves that it is Johnson's own.' The mistake, of course, is the Dean's and the Professor's, who did not take the trouble to ascertain what Johnson had really written. If we may trust Cradock, Johnson here gave in a Latin form what he had already said in English. 'When a bookseller ventured to say something rather slightingly of Dr. Goldsmith, Johnson retorted:--"Sir, Goldsmith never touches any subject but he adorns it." Once when I found the Doctor very low at his chambers I related this circumstance to him, and it instantly proved a cordial.' Cradock's Memoirs, i. 231.
[241] According to Mr. Forster (Life of Goldsmith, i. 1), he was born on Nov. 10, 1728. There is a passage in Goldsmith's Bee, No. 2, which leads me to think that he himself held Nov. 12 as his birth-day. He says; 'I shall be sixty-two the twelfth of next November.' Now, as The Bee was published in October 1759, he would be, not sixty-two, but just half that number--thirty-one on his next birth-day. It is scarcely likely that he selected the number and the date at random.
[242] Reynolds chose the spot in Westminster Abbey where the monument should stand. Northcote's Reynolds, i. 326.
[243] For A. Chamier, see ante, i. 478, note 1; and post, April 9, 1778: for P. Metcalfe, post, under Dec. 20, 1782. W. Vachell seems only known to fame as having signed this Round Robin, and attended Sir Joshua's funeral. Who Tho. Franklin was I cannot learn. He certainly was not Thomas Francklin, D.D., the Professor of Greek at Cambridge and translator of Sophocles and Lucian, mentioned post, end of 1780. The Rev. Dr. Luard, the Registrar of that University, has kindly compared for me six of his signatures ranging from 1739 to 1770. In each of these the c is very distinct, while the writing is unlike the signature in the Round Robin.
[244] Horace Walpole wrote in Dec. of this year:--'The conversation of many courtiers was openly in favour of arbitrary power. Lord Huntingdon and Dr. Barnard, who was promised an Irish Bishopric, held such discourse publicly.' Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 91.
[245] He however upon seeing Dr. Warton's name to the suggestion, that the Epitaph should be in English, observed to Sir Joshua, 'I wonder that Joe Warton, a scholar by profession, should be such a fool.' He said too, 'I should have thought Mund Burke would have had more sense.' Mr.