[723] See ante, i. 413, ii. 214, and Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 2.
[724] See ante, i. 478.
[725] 'Who can doubt,' asks Mr. Forster, 'that he also meant slowness of motion? The first point of the picture is that. The poet is moving slowly, his tardiness of gait measuring the heaviness of heart, the pensive spirit, the melancholy of which it is the outward expression and sign.' Forster's Goldsmith, i. 369.
[726] See ante, ii. 5.
[727] Essay on Man, ii. 2.
[728] Gibbon could have illustrated this subject, for not long before he had at Paris been 'introduced,' he said, 'to the best company of both sexes, to the foreign ministers of all nations, and to the first names and characters of France.' Gibbon's Misc. Works, i. 227. He says of an earlier visit:--'Alone, in a morning visit, I commonly found the artists and authors of Paris less vain and more reasonable than in the circles of their equals, with whom they mingle in the houses of the rich.' Ib. p. 162. Horace Walpole wrote of the Parisians in 1765, (Letters, iv. 436):--'Their gaiety is not greater than their delicacy--but I will not expatiate. [He had just described the grossness of the talk of women of the first rank.] Several of the women are agreeable, and some of the men; but the latter are in general vain and ignorant. The savans--I beg their pardon, the philosophes--are insupportable, superficial, overbearing, and fanatic.'
[729] See post, under Aug. 29, 1783, and Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 14.
[730] See post, April 28, 1783.
[731] See ante, p. 191.
[732] [Greek: 'gaerusko d aiei polla didaskomenos.'] 'I grow in learning as I grow in years.' Plutarch, Solon, ch. 31.
[733]
''Tis somewhat to be lord of some small ground In which a lizard may at least turn around.'
Dryden, Juvenal, iii. 230.
[734] Modern characters from Shakespeare. Alphabetically arranged. A New Edition. London, 1778. It is not a pamphlet but a duodecimo of 88 pages. Some of the lines are very grossly applied.
[735] As You Like it, act iii. sc. 2. The giant's name is Gargantua, not Garagantua. In Modern Characters (p. 47), the next line also is given:--'Tis a word too great for any mouth of this age's size.' The lines that Boswell next quotes are not given.
[736] Coriolanus, act iii. sc. 1.
[737] See vol. i. p. 498. BOSWELL.
[738] See ante, ii. 236, where Johnson charges Robertson with verbiage. This word is not in his Dictionary.
[739] Pope, meeting Bentley at dinner, addressed him thus:--'Dr. Bentley, I ordered my bookseller to send you your books. I hope you received them.' Bentley, who had purposely avoided saying anything about Homer, pretended not to understand him, and asked, 'Books! books! what books?' 'My Homer,' replied Pope, 'which you did me the honour to subscribe for.'--'Oh,' said Bentley, 'ay, now I recollect--your translation:--it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.' Johnson's Works, viii. 336, note.
[740] 'It is certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen; and its publication must therefore be considered as one of the great events in the annals of Learning.' Ib. p. 256. 'There would never,' said Gray, 'be another translation of the same poem equal to it.' Gray's Works, ed. 1858, v. 37. Cowper however says, that he and a friend 'compared Pope's translation throughout with the original. They were not long in discovering that there is hardly the thing in the world of which Pope was so utterly destitute as a taste for Homer.' Southey's Cowper, i. 106.
[741] Boswell here repeats what he had heard from Johnson, ante, p. 36.
[742] Swift, in his Preface to Temple's Letters, says:--'It is generally believed that this author has advanced our English tongue to as great a perfection as it can well bear.' Temple's Works, i. 226. Hume, in his Essay Of Civil Liberty, wrote in 1742:--'The elegance and propriety of style have been very much neglected among us. The first polite prose we have was writ by a man who is still alive (Swift). As to Sprat, Locke, and even Temple, they knew too little of the rules of art to be esteemed elegant writers.' Mackintosh says (Life, ii. 205):--'Swift represents Temple as having brought English style to perfection. Hume, I think, mentions him; but of late he is not often spoken of as one of the reformers of our style--this, however, he certainly was. The structure of his style is perfectly modern.' Johnson said that he had partly formed his style upon Temple's; ante, i. 218. In the last Rambler, speaking of what he had himself done for our language, he says:--'Something, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence.'
[743] 'Clarendon's diction is neither exact in itself, nor suited to the purpose of history. It is the effusion of a mind crowded with ideas, and desirous of imparting them; and therefore always accumulating words, and involving one clause and sentence in another.' The Rambler, No. 122.
[744] Johnson's addressing himself with a smile to Mr.