BOSWELL. See ante, iii. 141, 269.
[1099] It was on this day that he wrote the prayer given below (p. 370) in which is found that striking line--'this world where much is to be done and little to be known.'
[1100] His letter to Dr. Heberden (Croker's Boswell, p. 789) shews that he had gone with Dr. Brocklesby to the last Academy dinner, when, as he boasted, 'he went up all the stairs to the pictures without stopping to rest or to breathe.' Ante, p. 270, note 2.
[1101]
Quid te exempta levat spinis de pluribus una? 'Pluck out one thorn to mitigate thy pain, What boots it while so many more remain?'
FRANCIS. Horace, 2 Epistles, ii. 212.
[1102] See ante, iii. 4, note 2.
[1103] Sir Joshua's physician. He is mentioned by Goldsmith in his verses to the Miss Hornecks. Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 149.
[1104] How much balloons filled people's minds at this time is shewn by such entries as the following in Windham's Diary:-'Feb 7, 1784. Did not rise till past nine; from that time till eleven, did little more than indulge in idle reveries about balloons.' p. 3. 'July 20. The greater part of the time, till now, one o'clock, spent in foolish reveries about balloons.' p. 12. Horace Walpole wrote on Sept. 30 (Letters, viii. 505):--'I cannot fill my paper, as the newspapers do, with air-balloons; which though ranked with the invention of navigation, appear to me as childish as the flying kites of school-boys.' 'Do not write about the balloon,' wrote Johnson to Reynolds (post, p. 368), 'whatever else you may think proper to say.' In the beginning of the year he had written:--'It is very seriously true that a subscription of L800 has been raised for the wire and workmanship of iron wings.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 345.
[1105] It is remarkable that so good a Latin scholar as Johnson, should have been so inattentive to the metre, as by mistake to have written stellas instead of ignes. BOSWELL.
[1106]
'Micat inter omnes Julium sidus, velut inter ignes Luna minores.' 'And like the Moon, the feebler fires among, Conspicuous shines the Julian star.'
FRANCIS. Horace, Odes, i. 12. 46.
[1107] See ante, iii. 209.
[1108]
'The little blood that creeps within his veins Is but just warmed in a hot fever's pains.'
DRYDEN. Juvenal, Satires, x. 217.
[1109] Lunardi had made, on Sept. 15, the first balloon ascent in England. Gent. Mag. 1784, p. 711. Johnson wrote to Mr. Ryland on Sept. 18:--'I had this day in three letters three histories of the Flying Man in the great Balloon.' He adds:--'I live in dismal solitude.' Notes and Queries, 5th S. vii. 381.
[1110] 'Sept. 27, 1784. Went to see Blanchard's balloon. Met Burke and D. Burke; walked with them to Pantheon to see Lunardi's. Sept. 29. About nine came to Brookes's, where I heard that the balloon had been burnt about four o'clock.' Windham's Diary, p. 24.
[1111] His love of London continually appears. In a letter from him to Mrs. Smart, wife of his friend the Poet, which is published in a well-written life of him, prefixed to an edition of his Poems, in 1791, there is the following sentence:-'To one that has passed so many years in the pleasures and opulence of London, there are few places that can give much delight.'
Once, upon reading that line in the curious epitaph quoted in The Spectator;
'Born in New-England, did in London die;'
he laughed and said, 'I do not wonder at this. It would have been strange, if born in London, he had died in New-England.' BOSWELL. Mrs. Smart was in Dublin when Johnson wrote to her. After the passage quoted by Boswell he continued:--'I think, Madam, you may look upon your expedition as a proper preparative to the voyage which we have often talked of. Dublin, though a place much worse than London, is not so bad as Iceland.' Smart's Poems, i. xxi. For Iceland see ante, i. 242. The epitaph, quoted in The Spectator, No. 518, begins--
Here Thomas Sapper lies interred. Ah why! Born in New-England, did in London die.'
[1112] St. Mark, v. 34.
[1113] There is no record of this in the Gent. Mag. Among the 149 persons who that summer had been sentenced to death (ante, p. 328) who would notice these two?
[1114] See ante, p. 356, note 1
[1115] Johnson wrote for him a Dedication of his Tasso in 1763. Ante, i. 383.
[1116] There was no information for which Dr. Johnson was less grateful that than for that which concerned the weather. It was in allusion to his impatience with those who were reduced to keep conversation alive by observations on the weather, that he applied the old proverb to himself. If any one of his intimate acquaintance told him it was hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm, he would stop them, by saying, 'Poh! poh! you are telling us that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant. Let us bear with patience, or enjoy in quiet, elementary changes, whether for the better or the worse, as they are never secrets.' BURNEY. In The Idler, No. II, Johnson shews that 'an Englishman's notice of the weather is the natural consequence of changeable skies and uncertain seasons...