Mill's British India, ed. 1840, iv. 276.
[1059] 'To count is a modern practice, the ancient method was to guess; and when numbers are guessed, they are always magnified.' Johnson's Works, ix. 95.
[1060] He published in 1714 An Account of Switzerland.
[1061] See ante, ii. 468.
[1062] See Appendix C.
[1063] 'All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future which has not been given us. They are, I think, a crime, because they resign that life to chance which God has given us to be regulated by reason; and superinduce a kind of fatality, from which it is the great privilege of our nature to be free.' Piozzi Letters, i. 83. Johnson (Works, vii. 52) praises the 'just and noble thoughts' in Cowley's lines which begin:--
'Where honour or where conscience does not bind, No other law shall shackle me; Slave to myself I ne'er will be; Nor shall my future actions be confined By my own present mind.'
See ante, ii. 21.
[1064] Juvenal, Sat. iii. 78. Imitated by Johnson in London.
[1065] See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 16, and Johnson's Tour into Wales, Aug. 1, 1774.
[1066] The slip of paper on which he made the correction, is deposited by me in the noble library to which it relates, and to which I have presented other pieces of his hand-writing. BOSWELL. In substituting burns he resumes the reading of the first edition, in which the former of the two couplets ran:--
'Resistless burns the fever of renown, Caught from the strong contagion of the gown.'
'The slip of paper and the other pieces of Johnson's hand-writing' have been lost. At all events they are not in the Bodleian.
[1067] Johnson (Works, vii. 76), criticising Milton's scheme of education, says:--'Those authors therefore are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians. Let me not be censured for this digression as pedantic or paradoxical; for if I have Milton against me, I have Socrates on my side. It was his labour to turn philosophy from the study of nature to speculations upon life; but the innovators whom I oppose are turning off attention from life to nature. They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of opinion that what we had to learn was how to do good and avoid evil. "[Greek: hotti toi en megaroisi kakon t agathon te tetuktai]."'
[1068] 'His ear was well-tuned, and his diction was elegant and copious, but his devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topicks enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well.' Ib. viii. 386. See ante, i. 312. Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 200) says that when 'Johnson would inveigh against devotional poetry, and protest that all religious verses were cold and feeble,' she reminded him how 'when he would try to repeat the Dies irae, dies illa, he could never pass the stanza ending thus, Tantus labor non sit cassus, without bursting into a flood of tears.'
[1069] See ante, ii. 169, note 2.
[1070] Dr. Johnson was by no means attentive to minute accuracy in his Lives of the Poets; for notwithstanding my having detected this mistake, he has continued it. BOSWELL. See post, iv. 51, note 2 for a like instance of neglect.
[1071] See ante, ii. 64.
[1072] See ante, ii. 278.
[1073] 'May 31, 1778. We shall at least not doze, as we are used to do, in summer. The Parliament is to have only short adjournments; and our senators, instead of retiring to horseraces (their plough), are all turned soldiers, and disciplining militia. Camps everywhere.' Horace Walpole's Letters, vii. 75. It was a threat of invasion by the united forces of France and Spain, at the time that we were at war with America, that caused the alarm. Dr. J.H. Burton (Dr. A. Carlyle's Auto. p. 399) points out, that while the militia of England was placed nearly in its present position by the act of 1757, yet 'when a proposal for extending the system to Scotland was suggested (sic), ministers were afraid to arm the people.' 'It is curious,' he continues, 'that for a reason almost identical Ireland has been excepted from the Volunteer organisation of a century later. It was not until 1793 that the Militia Acts were extended to Scotland.'
[1074] 'Before dinner,' wrote Miss Burney in September of this year, 'to my great joy Dr. Johnson returned home from Warley Common.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 114. He wrote to Mrs. Thrale on Oct. 15:--'A camp, however familiarly we may speak of it, is one of the great scenes of human life. War and peace divide the business of the world. Camps are the habitations of those who conquer kingdoms, or defend them.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 22.
[1075] Third Edition, p. 111 [Aug. 28]. BOSWELL. It was at Fort George. '