MALONE.
[1335] Johnson added:--'All danger here is apparently over; but a little agitation still continues. We frighten one another with a seventy-thousand Scots to come hither with the Dukes of Gordon and Argyle, and eat us, and hang us, or drown us.' Two days later Horace Walpole, after mentioning that Lord George Gordon was in the Tower, continued:--'What a nation is Scotland; in every reign engendering traitors to the State, and false and pernicious to the Kings that favour it the most. National prejudices, I know, are very vulgar; but if there are national characteristics, can one but dislike the soils and climates that concur to produce them?' Letters, vii. 400.
[1336] He died Nov. 19, 1792, and left 'about, L20,000 accumulated not parsimoniously, but during a very long possession of a profitable office.' His father, who was keeper before him, began as a turnkey. Gent. Mag. 1792, p. 1062. Wesley wrote on Jan. 2, 1761:--'Of all the seats of woe on this side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or even equal Newgate. If any region of horror could exceed it a few years ago, Newgate in Bristol did; so great was the filth, the stench, the misery, and wickedness which shocked all who had a spark of humanity left.' He described a great change for the better which had lately been made in the London Newgate. Perhaps it was due to Akerman. Wesley's Journal, iii. 32.
[1337] There were two city prisons so called.
[1338] In the first two editions will. Boswell, in the third edition, corrected most of his Scotticisms.
[1339] In the Life of Savage (Works, viii. 183) Johnson wrote of the keeper of the Bristol gaol:--'Virtue is undoubtedly most laudable in that state which makes it most difficult; and therefore the humanity of a gaoler certainly deserves this publick attestation; and the man whose heart has not been hardened by such an employment may be justly proposed as a pattern of benevolence. If an inscription was once engraved "to the honest toll-gatherer," less honours ought not to be paid "to the tender gaoler."' This keeper, Dagge by name, was one of Whitefield's disciples. In 1739 Whitefield wrote:--'God having given me great favour in the gaoler's eyes, I preached a sermon on the Penitent Thief, to the poor prisoners in Newgate.' He began to read prayers and preach to them every day, till the Mayor and Sheriffs forbade Mr. Dagge to allow him to preach again. Tyerman's Whitefield, i. 179.
[1340] Vol. ii. p. 163. Mrs. Piozzi has omitted the name, she best knows why. BOSWELL.
[1341] Now settled in London. BOSWELL.
[1342] I had been five years absent from London. BEATTIE.
[1343] '--sic fata ferebant.' AEneid, ii. 34.
[1344] Meaning his entertaining Memoirs of David Garrick, Esq., of which Johnson (as Davies informed me) wrote the first sentence; thus giving, as it were, the key-note performance. It is, indeed, very characteristical of its authour, beginning with a maxim, and proceeding to illustrate.--'All excellence has a right to be recorded. I shall, therefore, think it superfluous to apologise for writing the life of a man, who by an uncommon assemblage of private virtues, adorned the highest eminence in a publick profession.' BOSWELL.
[1345] Davies had become bankrupt. See ante, p. 223. Young, in his first Epistle to Pope, says:--
'For bankrupts write when ruined shops are shut As maggots crawl from out a perished nut.'
Davies's Memoirs of Garrick, published this spring, reached its third edition by the following year.
[1346] I wish he had omitted the suspicion expressed here, though I believe he meant nothing but jocularity; for though he and I differed sometimes in opinion, he well knew how much I loved and revered him. BEATTIE.
[1347] The Thrales fled from Bath where a riot had broken out, and travelled about the country in alarm for Mr. Thrale's 'personal safety,' as it had been maliciously asserted in a Bath and Bristol paper that he was a Papist. Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 399.
[1348] On May 30 he wrote to Mrs. Thrale:--'I have been so idle that I know not when I shall get either to you, or to any other place; for my resolution is to stay here till the work is finished.... I hope, however, to see standing corn in some part of the earth this summer, but I shall hardly smell hay, or suck clover flowers.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 140.
[1349] It will, no doubt, be remarked how he avoids the rebellious land of America. This puts me in mind of an anecdote, for which I am obliged to my worthy social friend, Governour Richard Penn: 'At one of Miss E. Hervey's assemblies, Dr. Johnson was following her up and down the room; upon which Lord Abingdon observed to her, "Your great friend is very fond of you; you can go no where without him."--"Ay, (said she), he would follow me to any part of the world."--"Then (said the Earl), ask him to go with you to America.'" BOSWELL. This lady was the niece of Johnson's friends the Herveys [ante, i. 106]. CROKER.
[1350] Essays on the History of Mankind. BOSWELL. Johnson could scarcely have known that Dunbar was an active opponent of the American war.