430); 'a brute,' 'an old decrepit hireling' (ib. p. 472); and as 'one of the subordinate crew whom to name is to stigmatize' (ib. ii. 5). In his Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iv. 297, he says:--'With a lumber of learning and some strong parts Johnson was an odious and mean character. His manners were sordid, supercilious, and brutal; his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious, and, in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness of a country schoolmaster.'
[970] See ante, i. 367.
[971] On May 26, 1791, Walpole wrote of Boswell's Life of Johnson (Letters ix. 3l9):--'I expected amongst the excommunicated to find myself, but am very gently treated. I never would be in the least acquainted with Johnson; or, as Boswell calls it, I had not a just value for him; which the biographer imputes to my resentment for the Doctor's putting bad arguments (purposely out of Jacobitism) into the speeches which he wrote fifty years ago for my father in the Gentleman's Magazine; which I did not read then, or ever knew Johnson wrote till Johnson died.' Johnson said of these Debates:--'I saved appearances tolerably well; but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.' Ante, i. 504. 'Lord Holland said that whenever Boswell came into a company where Horace Walpole was, Walpole would throw back his head, purse up his mouth very significantly, and not speak a word while Boswell remained.' Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie, i. 155. Walpole (Letters, viii. 44) says:--'Boswell, that quintessence of busybodies, called on me last week, and was let in, which he should not have been, could I have foreseen it. After tapping many topics, to which I made as dry answers as an unbribed oracle, he vented his errand.'
[972] Walpole wrote (Letters, vi. 44):--'If The School for Wives and The Christmas Tale were laid to me, so was The Heroic Espistle. I could certainly have written the two former, but not the latter.' See ante, iv. 113.
[973] The title given by Bishop Pearson to his collection of Hales's Writings is the Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable John Hales of Eaton College, &c. It was published in 1659.
[974] I Henry IV, act ii. sc. 4. 'Sir James Mackintosh remembers that, while spending the Christmas of 1793 at Beaconsfield, Mr. Burke said to him, 'Johnson showed more powers of mind in company than in his writings; but he argued only for victory; and when he had neither a paradox to defend, nor an antagonist to crush, he would preface his assent with "Why, no, Sir."' CROKER. Croker's Boswell, p. 768.
[975]
Search then the ruling passion: There alone The wild are constant, and the cunning known; The fool consistent, and the false sincere; Priests, princes, women, no dissemblers here.' Pope, Moral Essays, i. 174.
'The publick pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are counterfeit.' The Idler, No. 18.
[976] Ante, ii. 241, and iii. 325.
[977] Boswell refers to Cicero's Treatise on Famous Orators.
[978] Boswell here falls into a mistake. About harvest-time in 1766, there were corn-riots owing to the dearness of bread. By the Act of the 15th of Charles II, corn, when under a certain price, might be legally exported. On Sept. 26, 1766, before this price had been reached, the Crown issued a proclamation to prohibit the exportation of grain. When parliament met in November, a bill of indemnity was brought in for those concerned in the late embargo. 'The necessity of the embargo was universally allowed;' it was the exercise by the Crown of a power of dispensing with the laws that was attacked. Some of the ministers who, out of office, 'had set up as the patrons of liberty,' were made the object 'of many sarcasms on the beaten subject of occasional patriotism.' Ann. Reg. x. 39-48, and Dicey's Law of the Constitution, p. 50.
[979] St. Mark, ii. 9.
[980] Anecdotes, p. 43. BOSWELL. The passage is from the Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775. Payne's Burke, i. 173. The image of the angel and Lord Bathurst was thus, according to Mrs. Piozzi, parodied by Johnson:--'Suppose, Mr. Speaker, that to Wharton, or to Marlborough, or to any of the eminent Whigs of the last age, the devil had, not with great impropriety, consented to appear.' See ante, iii. 326, where Johnson said 'the first Whig was the Devil.'
[981] Boswell was stung by what Mrs. Piozzi wrote when recording this parody. She said that she had begged Johnson's leave to write it down directly. 'A trick,' she continues, 'which I have seen played on common occasions of sitting steadily [? stealthily] down at the other end of the room to write at the moment what should be said in company, either by Dr. Johnson or to him, I never practised myself, nor approved of in another. There is something so ill-bred, and so inclining to treachery in this conduct, that, were it commonly adopted, all confidence would soon be exiled from society.' See post, under June 30, 1784, where Boswell refers to this passage.