p. 83.
[856] Johnson, in his political economy, seems to have been very much under Mandeville's influence. Thus in attacking Milton's position that 'a popular government was the most frugal; for the trappings of a monarchy would set up our ordinary commonwealth,' he says, 'The support and expense of a court is, for the most part, only a particular kind of traffick, by which money is circulated, without any national impoverishment.' Works, vii. 116. Mandeville in much the same way says:--'When a covetous statesman is gone, who spent his whole life in fattening himself with the spoils of the nation, and had by pinching and plundering heaped up an immense treasure, it ought to fill every good member of the society with joy to behold the uncommon profuseness of his son. This is refunding to the public whatever was robbed from it. As long as the nation has its own back again, we ought not to quarrel with the manner in which the plunder is repaid.' Ib. p. 104.
[857] See ante, ii. 176.
[858] In The Adventurer, No. 50, Johnson writes:--'"The devils," says Sir Thomas Brown, "do not tell lies to one another; for truth is necessary to all societies; nor can the society of hell subsist without it."' Mr. Wilkin, the editor of Brown's Works (ed. 1836, i. liv), says:--'I should be glad to know the authority of this assertion.' I infer from this that the passage is not in Brown's Works.
[859] Hannah More: see post, under date of June 30, 1784.
[860] In her visits to London she was commonly the guest of the Garricks. A few months before this conversation Garrick wrote a prologue and epilogue for her tragedy of Percy. He invested for her the money that she made by this play. H. More's Memoirs, i. 122, 140.
[861] In April 1784 she records (ib. i. 319) that she called on Johnson shortly after she wrote Le Bas Bleu. 'As to it,' she continues, 'all the flattery I ever received from everybody together would not make up his sum. He said there was no name in poetry that might not be glad to own it. All this from Johnson, that parsimonious praiser!' He wrote of it to Mrs. Thrale on April 19, 1784:--'It is in my opinion a very great performance.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 364. Dr. Beattie wrote on July 31, 1784:--'Johnson told me with great solemnity that Miss More was "the most powerful versificatrix" in the English language.' Forbes's Beattie, ed. 1824, p. 320.
[862] See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 18.
[863] The ancestor of Mr. Murray of Albemarle Street.
[864] See A Letter to W. Mason, A.M. from J. Murray, Bookseller in London; 2d edition, p. 20. BOSWELL.
[865] 'The righteous hath hope in his death.' Proverbs, xiv. 32.
[866] See post, June 12, 1784.
[867] Johnson, in The Convict's Address (ante, p. 141), makes Dodd say:--'Possibly it may please God to afford us some consolation, some secret intimations of acceptance and forgiveness. But these radiations of favour are not always felt by the sincerest penitents. To the greater part of those whom angels stand ready to receive, nothing is granted in this world beyond rational hope; and with hope, founded on promise, we may well be satisfied.'
[868] 'I do not find anything able to reconcile us to death but extreme pain, shame or despair; for poverty, imprisonment, ill fortune, grief, sickness and old age do generally fail.' Swift's Works, ed. 1803, xiv. 178.
[869] 'I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.' 2 Timothy, iv. 7 and 8.
[870] See ante, p. 154.
[871] 'Inde illud Maecenatis turpissimum votum, quo et debilitatem non recusat, et deformitatem, et novissime acutam crucem dummodo inter haec mala spiritus prorogetur.
"Debilem facito manu, Debilem pede, coxa; Tuber adstrue gibberum, Lubricos quate dentes; Vita dum superest, bene est; Hanc mihi vel acuta Si sedeam cruce sustine."'
Seneca's Epistles, No. 101.
Dryden makes Gonsalvo say in The Rival Ladies, act iv. sc. 1:--
'For men with horrour dissolution meet, The minutes e'en of painful life are sweet.'
In Paradise Lost Moloch and Belial take opposite sides on this point:--
MOLOCH. 'What doubt we to incense His utmost ire? which, to the height enraged, Will either quite consume us, and reduce To nothing this essential; happier far Than miserable to have eternal being.'
Bk. ii. 1. 94.
BELIAL. 'Who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion?'
1. 146.
Cowper, at times at least, held with Moloch. He wrote to his friend Newton:--'I feel--I will not tell you what--and yet I must--a wish that I had never been, a wonder that I am, and an ardent but hopeless desire not to be.' Southey's Cowper, vi. 130. See ante, p. 153, and Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 12.
[872] Johnson recorded in Pr. and Med. p. 202:--'At Ashbourne I hope to talk seriously with Taylor.' Taylor published in 1787 A Letter to Samuel Johnson on the Subject of a Future State.