He made a very good figure upon these topicks. He said to me afterwards that "he had talked ostentatiously."'
[1076] When I one day at Court expressed to General Hall my sense of the honour he had done my friend, he politely answered, 'Sir, I did myself honour.' BOSWELL.
[1077] According to Malone, 'Mr. Burke said of Mr. Boswell that good nature was so natural to him that he had no merit in possessing it, and that a man might as well assume to himself merit in possessing an excellent constitution.' European Mag. 1798, p. 376. See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 21.
[1078] Langton. See ante, iii. 48.
[1079] No doubt his house at Langton.
[1080] The Wey Canal. See ante, ii. 136. From navigation, i.e. a canal for internal navigation, we have navvy. A canal was the common term for an ornamental pool, and for a time it seemed that navigation and not canal might be the term applied to artificial rivers.
[1081] Langton.
[1082]
'He plunging downward shot his radiant head: Dispelled the breathing air that broke his flight; Shorn of his beams, a man to mortal sight.'
Dryden, quoted in Johnson's Dictionary under shorn. The phrase first appears in Paradise Lost, i. 596.
[1083] Mrs. Thrale, this same summer, 'asked whether Mr. Langton took any better care of his affairs. "No, madam," cried the doctor, "and never will. He complains of the ill-effects of habit, and rests contentedly upon a confessed indolence. He told his father himself that he had no turn to economy, but a thief might as well plead that he had no turn to honesty!"' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 75.
[1084] Locke, in his last words to Collins, said:--'This world affords no solid satisfaction but the consciousness of well-doing, and the hopes of another life.' Warburton's Divine Legation, i. xxvi.
[1085] Not the young brewer who was hoped for (ante, iii. 210); therefore she is called 'poor thing.' One of Mr. Thrale's daughters lived to Nov. 5, 1858.
[1086] On Oct. 15 Johnson wrote:--'Is my master [i.e. Mr. Thrale, ante, i. 494, note 3] come to himself? Does he talk, and walk, and look about him, as if there were yet something in the world for which it is worth while to live? Or does he yet sit and say nothing? To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them.' Piozzi Letters. ii. 22. Nine days later he wrote:--'You appear to me to be now floating on the spring-tide of prosperity. I think it very probably in your power to lay up L8000 a-year for every year to come, increasing all the time, what needs not be increased, the splendour of all external appearance. And surely such a state is not to be put into yearly hazard for the pleasure of keeping the house full, or the ambition of out-brewing Whitbread? Piozzi Letters, p. 24.
[1087] See ante, ii. 136. The following letter, of which a fac-simile is given at the beginning of vol. iii. of Dr. Franklin's Memoirs, ed. 1818, tells of 'a difference' between the famous printer of Philadelphia and the King's Printer of London.
'Philada., July 5, 1775.
'Mr. Strahan,
'You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that Majority which has doomed my Country to Destruction.--You have begun to burn our Towns, and murder our People.--Look upon your Hands!--They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! You and I were long friends:--You are now my Enemy,--and
'I am, yours,
'B. FRANKLIN.'
When peace was made between the two countries the old friendship was renewed. Ib. iii. 147.
[1088] On this day he wrote a touching letter to Mr. Elphinston, who had lost his wife (Croker's Boswell, p. 66, note). Perhaps the thoughts thus raised in him led him to this act of reconciliation.
[1089] Dr. Johnson here addresses his worthy friend, Bennet Langton, Esq., by his title as Captain of the Lincolnshire militia, in which he has since been most deservedly raised to the rank of Major. BOSWELL.
[1090] President of the Royal Society.
[1091] The King visited Warley Camp on Oct. 20. Ann. Reg. xxi. 237.
[1092] He visited Coxheath Camp on Nov. 23. Ib. Horace Walpole, writing of April of this year when, in the alarm of a French invasion, the militia were called out, says:--'The King's behaviour was childish and absurd. He ordered the camp equipage, and said he would command the army himself.' Walpole continues:--'It is reported, that in a few days will be published in two volumes, folio, an accurate account of His Majesty's Journeys to Chatham and Portsmouth, together with a minute Description of his numerous Fatigues, Dangers, and hair-breadth Escapes; to which will be added the Royal Bon-mots. And the following week will be published an History of all the Campaigns of the King of Prussia, in one volume duodecimo.' Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 262, 264.
[1093] Boswell, eleven years later, wrote of him:--'My second son is an extraordinary boy; he is much of his father (vanity of vanities). He is of a delicate constitution, but not unhealthy, and his spirit never fails him. He is still in the house with me; indeed he is quite my companion, though only eleven in September.' Letters of Boswell, p. 315.