de Caraccioli was published in 1776. By the Gent. Mag. (xlvi. 563) they were accepted as genuine. In The Ann. Reg. for the same year (xix. 185) was published a translation the letter in which Voltaire had attacked their authenticity. The passage that Johnson quotes is the following:--'On est en droit de lui dire ce qu'on dit autrefois a l'abbe Nodot: "Montrez-nous votre manuscript de Petrone, trouve a Belgrade, ou consentez a n'etre cru of de personne."' Voltaire's Works, xliii. 544.
[837] Baretti (Journey from London to Genoa, i. 9) says that he saw in 1760, near Honiton, at a small rivulet, 'an engine called a ducking-stool; a kind of armed wooden chair, fixed on the extremity of a pole about fifteen feet long. The pole is horizontally placed on a post just by the water, and loosely pegged to that post; so that by raising it at one end, you lower the stool down into the midst of the river. That stool serves at present to duck scolds and termagants.'
[838] 'An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.' Much Ado about Nothing, act iii. sc. 5.
[839] See ante, ii. 9.
[840] 'One star differeth from another star in glory.' I Cor. xv. 41.
[841] See ante, iii. 48, 280.
[842] 'The physicians in Hogarth's prints are not caricatures: the full dress with a sword and a great tye-wig, and the hat under the arm, and the doctors in consultation, each smelling to a gold-headed cane shaped like a parish-beadle's staff, are pictures of real life in his time, and myself have seen a young physician thus equipped walk the streets of London without attracting the eyes of passengers.' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 238. Dr. T. Campbell in 1777, writing of Dublin to a London physician, says:--'No sooner were your medical wigs laid aside than an attempt was made to do the like here. But in vain.' Survey of the South of Ireland, p. 463.
[843] 'Jenyns,' wrote Malone, on the authority of W.G. Hamilton, 'could not be made without much labour to comprehend an argument. If however there was anything weak or ridiculous in what another said, he always laid hold of it and played upon it with success. He looked at everything with a view to pleasantry alone. This being his grand object, and he being no reasoner, his best friends were at a loss to know whether his book upon Christianity was serious or ironical.' Prior's Malone, p. 375.
[844] Jenyns maintains (p. 51) that 'valour, patriotism, and friendship are only fictitious virtues--in fact no virtue at all.'
[845] He had furnished an answer to this in The Rambler, No. 99, where he says:--'To love all men is our duty so far as it includes a general habit of benevolence, and readiness of occasional kindness; but to love all equally is impossible.... The necessities of our condition require a thousand offices of tenderness, which mere regard for the species will never dictate. Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain for ever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attentive to every misery.' See ante, i. 207, note 1.
[846] Galatians, vi. 10.
[847] St. John, xxi. 20. Compare Jeremy Taylor's Measures and Offices of Friendship, ch. i. 4.
[848] In the first two editions 'from this amiable and pleasing subject.'
[849] Acts of the Apostles, ix. i.
[850] See ante, ii. 82.
[851] If any of my readers are disturbed by this thorny question, I beg leave to recommend, to them Letter 69 of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes; and the late Mr. John Palmer of Islington's Answer to Dr. Priestley's mechanical arguments for what he absurdly calls 'Philosophical Necessity.' BOSWELL. See post, under Aug. 29, 1783; note.
[852] See ante, ii. 217, and iii. 55.
[853] 'I have proved,' writes Mandeville (Fables of the Bees, ed. 1724, p. 179), 'that the real pleasures of all men in nature are worldly and sensual, if we judge from their practice; I say all men in nature, because devout Christians, who alone are to be excepted here, being regenerated and preternaturally assisted by the divine grace, cannot be said to be in nature.'
[854] Mandeville describes with great force the misery caused by gin-- 'liquid poison' he calls it--'which in the fag-end and outskirts of the town is sold in some part or other of almost every house, frequently in cellars, and sometimes in the garret.' He continues:--'The short-sighted vulgar in the chain of causes seldom can see further than one link; but those who can enlarge their view may in a hundred places see good spring up and pullulate from evil, as naturally as chickens do from eggs.' He instances the great gain to the revenue, and to all employed in the production of the spirit from the husbandman upwards. Fable of the Bees, p. 89.
[855] 'If a miser, who is almost a plum (i.e. worth L100,000, Johnson's Dictionary), and spends but fifty pounds a year, should be robbed of a thousand guineas, it is certain that as soon as this money should come to circulate, the nation would be the better for the robbery; yet justice and the peace of the society require that the robber should be hanged.' Ib.