5, 1764. Mr. Elliot brings us woeful accounts of the French ladies, of the decency of their conversation, and the nastiness of their behaviour.' Walpole's Letters, iv. 277. Walpole wrote from Paris on Nov. 19, 1765, 'Paris is the ugliest, beastliest town in the universe,' and describes the nastiness of the talk of French women of the first rank. Ib. p. 435. Mrs. Piozzi, nearly twenty years later, places among 'the contradictions one meets with every moment' at Paris, 'A Countess in a morning, her hair dressed, with diamonds too perhaps, and a dirty black handkerchief about her neck.' Piozzi's Journey, i. 17. See ante, ii. 403, and post, under Aug. 29, 1783.
[1045] See Appendix B.
[1046] His lordship was, to the last, in the habit of telling this story rather too often. CROKER.
[1047] See ante, ii. 194.
[1048] See ante, iii. 178.
[1049] See ante, ii. 153.
[1050] 'Our eyes and ears may convince us,' wrote Wesley, 'there is not a less happy body of men in all England than the country farmers. In general their life is supremely dull; and it is usually unhappy too; for of all people in the kingdom, they are the most discontented, seldom satisfied either with God or man.' Southey's Wesley, i. 420. He did not hold with Johnson as to the upper classes. 'Oh! how hard it is,' he said, 'to be shallow enough for a polite audience.' Ib. p. 419.
[1051] Horne says:--'Even S. Johnson, though mistakenly, has attempted AND, and would find no difficulty with THEREFORE' (ed. 1778, p. 21). However, in a note on p. 56 he says:--'I could never read his preface [to his Dictionary] without shedding a tear.' See ante, i. 297, note 2.
[1052] In Mr. Horne Tooke's enlargement of that Letter, which he has since published with the title of [Greek: Epea pteroenta]; or, the Diversions of Purley; he mentions this compliment, as if Dr. Johnson instead of several of his etymologies had said all. His recollection having thus magnified it, shews how ambitious he was of the approbation of so great a man. BOSWELL. Horne Tooke says (ed. 1798, part i, p. 156) 'immediately after the publication of my Letter to Mr. Dunning I was informed by Mr. S. [Seward], an intimate friend of Dr. Johnson, that he had declared that, if he lived to give a new edition of his Dictionary, he should certainly adopt my derivations.' Boswell and Horne Tooke, says Stephens (Life of Tooke, ii. 438), had an altercation. 'Happening to meet at a gentleman's house, Mr. Boswell proposed to make up the breach, on the express condition, however, that they should drink a bottle of wine each between the toasts. But Mr. Tooke would not give his assent unless the liquor should be brandy. By the time a quart had been quaffed Boswell was left sprawling on the floor.'
[1053] See ante, iii. 314. Thurlow, the Attorney-General, pressed that Horne should be set in the pillory, 'observing that imprisonment would be "a slight inconvenience to one of sedentary habits."' It was during his imprisonment that he wrote his Letter to Mr. Dunning. Campbell's Chancellors, ed. 1846, v. 517. Horace Walpole says that 'Lord Mansfield was afraid, and would not venture the pillory.' Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 167.
[1054] 'Bulse, a certain quantity of diamonds' (India). Webster's Dictionary.
[1055] 'He raised,' says Hawkins (Life, p. 236), 'the medical character to such a height of dignity as was never seen in this or any other country. I have heard it said that when he began to practise, he was a frequenter of the meeting at Stepney where his father preached; and that when he was sent for out of the assembly, his father would in his prayer insert a petition in behalf of the sick person. I once mentioned this to Johnson, who said it was too gross for belief; but it was not so at Batson's [a coffee-house frequented by physicians]; it passed there as a current belief.' See ante, i. 159. Young has introduced him in the second of his Night Thoughts--
'That time is mine, O Mead, to thee I owe; Fain would I pay thee with eternity.'
Horace Walpole (Letters, viii. 260) says 'that he had nothing but pretensions.'
[1056] On Oct. 17, 1777, Burgoyne's army surrendered to the Americans at Saratoga. One of the articles of the Convention was 'that the army should march out of the camp with all the honours of war to a fixed place where they were to deposit their arms. It is said that General Gates [the American Commander] paid so nice and delicate an attention to the British military honour that he kept his army close within their lines, and did not suffer an American soldier to be a witness to the degrading spectacle of piling their arms.' Ann. Reg. xx. 173, 174. Horace Walpole, on Lord Cornwallis's capitulation in 1781, wrote:--'The newspapers on the Court side had been crammed with paragraphs for a fortnight, saying that Lord Cornwallis had declared he would never pile up his arms like Burgoyne; that is, he would rather die sword in hand.' Walpole's Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 475.
[1057] See ante, i. 342.
[1058] There was a Colonel Fullarton who took an important part in the war against Tippoo in 1783.