Pitts:--'Perhaps no scrap of Latin whatever has been more quoted than this. It occasionally falls even from those who are scrupulous even to pedantry in their Latinity, and will not admit a word into their compositions, which has not the sanction of the first age. The word demento is of no authority, either as a verb active or neuter.--After a long search for the purpose of deciding a bet, some gentlemen of Cambridge found it among the fragments of Euripides, in what edition I do not recollect, where it is given as a translation of a Greek Iambick: [Greek: Ou Theos thelei apolesoi' apophreuai.]
'The above scrap was found in the hand-writing of a suicide of fashion, Sir D. O., some years ago, lying on the table of the room where he had destroyed himself. The suicide was a man of classical acquirements: he left no other paper behind him.'
Another of these proverbial sayings,
Incidit in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charybdim,
I, in a note on a passage in The Merchant of Venice [act iii. sc. 5], traced to its source. It occurs (with a slight variation) in the Alexandreis of Philip Gualtier (a poet of the thirteenth century), which was printed at Lyons in 1558. Darius is the person addressed:--
--Quo tendis inertem, Rex periture, fugam? nescis, heu! perdite, nescis Quern fugias: hostes incurris dum fugis hostem; Incidis in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charybdim.
A line not less frequently quoted was suggested for enquiry in a note on The Rape of Lucrece:--
Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris--:
But the author of this verse has not, I believe, been discovered. MALONE. The 'Greek lambick' in the above note is not Greek. To a learned friend I owe the following note. 'The Quem Jupiter vult perdere, &c., is said to be a translation of a fragment of Euripides by Joshua Barnes. There is, I believe, no such fragment at all. In Barnes's Euripides, Cantab. 1694, fol. p. 515, is a fragment of Euripides with a note which may explain the muddle of Boswell's correspondent:--
"[Greek: otau de daimonn handri porsunae kaka ton noun heblapse proton,]"
on which Barnes writes:--"Tale quid in Franciados nostrae [probably his uncompleted poem on Edward III.] l. 3. Certe ille deorum Arbiter ultricem cum vult extendere dextram Dementat prius."' See ante, ii. 445, note 1. Sir D. O. is, perhaps, Sir D'Anvers Osborne, whose death is recorded in the Gent. Mag. 1753, p. 591. 'Sir D'Anvers Osborne, Bart., Governor of New York, soon after his arrival there; in his garden.' Solamen miseris, &c., is imitated by Swift in his Verses on Stella's Birthday, 1726-7:--
'The only comfort they propose, To have companions in their woes.'
Swift's Works, ed. 1803, xi. 22. The note on Lucrece was, I conjecture, on line 1111:--
'Grief best is pleased with grief's society.'
[571]
'FAUSTUS-- "Tu quoque, ut hic video, non es ignarus amorum." 'FORTUNATUS-- "Id commune malum; semel insanivimus omnes."'
Baptistae Mantuani Carmelitae Adolescentia, seu Bucolica. Ecloga I, published in 1498. 'Scaliger,' says Johnson (Works, viii. 391), 'complained that Mantuan's Bucolicks were received into schools, and taught as classical. ... He was read, at least in some of the inferiour schools of this kingdom, to the beginning of the present [eighteenth] century.'
[572] See ante, i. 368.
[573] See ante, i. 396.
[574] I am happy, however, to mention a pleasing instance of his enduring with great gentleness to hear one of his most striking particularities pointed out:--Miss Hunter, a niece of his friend Christopher Smart, when a very young girl, struck by his extraordinary motions, said to him, 'Pray, Dr. Johnson, why do you make such strange gestures?' 'From bad habit,' he replied. 'Do you, my dear, take care to guard against bad habits.' This I was told by the young lady's brother at Margate. BOSWELL. Boswell had himself told Johnson of some of them, at least in writing. Johnson read in manuscript his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Boswell says in a note on Oct. 12:--'It is remarkable that Dr. Johnson should have read this account of some of his own peculiar habits, without saying anything on the subject, which I hoped he would have done.'
[575] See ante, ii. 42, note 2, and iii. 324.
[576] Johnson, after stating that some of Milton's manuscripts prove that 'in the early part of his life he wrote with much care,' continues:--'Such reliques show how excellence is acquired; what we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.' Works, vii. 119. Lord Chesterfield (Letters, iii. 146) had made the same rule as Johnson:--'I was,' he writes, 'early convinced of the importance and powers of eloquence; and from that moment I applied myself to it. I resolved not to utter one word even in common conversation that should not be the most expressive and the most elegant that the language could supply me with for that purpose; by which means I have acquired such a certain degree of habitual eloquence, that I must now really take some pains if I would express myself very inelegantly.'
[577] 'Dr.