One of the ministers who has adhered to us almost all the time is an excellent scholar.' Piozzi Letters, i. 157.
[692] See post, Nov. 6.
[693] This was a dexterous mode of description, for the purpose of his argument; for what he alluded to was, a Sermon published by the learned Dr. William Wishart, formerly principal of the college at Edinburgh, to warn men against confiding in a death-bed repentance of the inefficacy of which he entertained notions very different from those of Dr. Johnson. BOSWELL.
[694] The Rev. Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 441) thus writes of the English clergy whom he met at Harrogate in 1763:--'I had never seen so many of them together before, and between this and the following year I was able to form a true judgment of them. They are, in general--I mean the lower order--divided into bucks and prigs; of which the first, though inconceivably ignorant, and sometimes indecent in their morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were unassuming, and had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves like gentlemen. The other division of them, the prigs, are truly not to be endured, for they are but half learned, are ignorant of the world, narrow-minded, pedantic, and overbearing. And now and then you meet with a rara avis who is accomplished and agreeable, a man of the world without licentiousness, of learning without pedantry, and pious without sanctimony; but this is a rara avis'.
[695] See ante, i. 446, note 1.
[696] Johnson defines manage in this sense to train a horse to graceful action, and quotes Young:--
'They vault from hunters to the managed steed.'
[697] Of Sir William Forbes of a later generation, Lockhart (Life of Scott, ix. 179) writes as follows:--'Sir William Forbes, whose banking-house was one of Messrs. Ballantyne's chief creditors, crowned his generous efforts for Scott's relief by privately paying the whole of Abud's demand (nearly L2000) out of his own pocket.'
[698] This scarcity of cash still exists on the islands, in several of which five shilling notes are necessarily issued to have some circulating medium. If you insist on having change, you must purchase something at a shop. WALTER SCOTT.
[699] 'The payment of rent in kind has been so long disused in England that it is totally forgotten. It was practised very lately in the Hebrides, and probably still continues, not only in St. Kilda, where money is not yet known, but in others of the smaller and remoter islands.' Johnson's Works, ix. 110.
[700] 'A place where the imagination is more amused cannot easily be found. The mountains about it are of great height, with waterfalls succeeding one another so fast, that as one ceases to be heard another begins.' Piozzi Letters, i. 157.
[701] See ante, i. 159.
[702] Johnson seems to be speaking of Hailes's Memorials and Letters relating to the History of Britain in the reign of James I and of Charles I.
[703] See ante, ii. 341.
[704] See ante, iii. 91.
[705] 'In all ages of the world priests have been enemies to liberty, and it is certain that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking and of expressing our thoughts is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded.... Hence it must happen in such a government as that of Britain, that the established clergy, while things are in their natural situation, will always be of the Court-party; as, on the contrary, dissenters of all kinds will be of the Country-party.' Hume's Essays, Part 1, No. viii.
[706] In the original Every island's but a prison. The song is by a Mr. Coffey, and is given in Ritson's English Songs (1813), ii. 122. It begins:--
'Welcome, welcome, brother debtor, To this poor but merry place, Where no bailiff, dun, nor setter, Dares to show his frightful face.'
See ante, iii. 269.
[707] He wrote to Mrs. Thrale the day before (perhaps it was this day, and the copyist blundered):--' I am still in Sky. Do you remember the song--
We have at one time no boat, and at another may have too much wind; but of our reception here we have no reason to complain.' Piozzi Letters, i. 143.
[708] My ingenuously relating this occasional instance of intemperance has I find been made the subject both of serious criticism and ludicrous banter. With the banterers I shall not trouble myself, but I wonder that those who pretend to the appellation of serious criticks should not have had sagacity enough to perceive that here, as in every other part of the present work, my principal object was to delineate Dr. Johnson's manners and character. In justice to him I would not omit an anecdote, which, though in some degree to my own disadvantage, exhibits in so strong a light the indulgence and good humour with which he could treat those excesses in his friends, of which he highly disapproved.
In some other instances, the criticks have been equally wrong as to the true motive of my recording particulars, the objections to which I saw as clearly as they.