Beauclerk was very earnest for you.' BOSWELL. 'Beauclerk has a keenness of mind which is very uncommon.' JOHNSON. 'Yes, sir; and every thing comes from him so easily. It appears to me that I labour, when I say a good thing.' BOSWELL. 'You are loud, sir; but it is not an effort of mind.'
Monboddo is a wretched place, wild and naked, with a poor old house; though, if I recollect right, there are two turrets which mark an old baron's residence. Lord Monboddo received us at his gate most courteously; pointed to the Douglas arms upon his house, and told us that his great-grandmother was of that family, 'In such houses,' said he, 'our ancestors lived, who were better men than we.' 'No, no, my lord,' said Dr Johnson. 'We are as strong as they, and a great deal wiser.' This was an assault upon one of Lord Monboddo's capital dogmas, and I was afraid there would have been a violent altercation in the very close, before we got into the house. But his lordship is distinguished not only for 'ancient metaphysicks', but for ancient politesse, la vieille cour, and he made no reply.
His lordship was drest in a rustick suit, and wore a little round hat; he told us, we now saw him as Farmer Burnett, and we should have his family dinner, a farmer's dinner. He said, 'I should not have forgiven Mr Boswell, had he not brought you here, Dr Johnson.' He produced a very long stalk of corn, as a specimen of his crop, and said, 'You see here the loetas segetes.' He added, that Virgil seemed to be as enthusiastick a farmer as he, and was certainly a practical one. JOHNSON. 'It does not always follow, my lord, that a man who has written a good poem on an art, has practised it. Philip Miller told me, that in Philips's "Cyder", a poem, all the precepts were just, and indeed better than in books written for the purpose of instructing; yet Philips had never made cyder.'
I started the subject of emigration. JOHNSON. 'To a man of mere animal life, you can urge no argument against going to America, but that it will be some time before he will get the earth to produce. But a man of any intellectual enjoyment will not easily go and immerse himself and his posterity for ages in barbarism.'
He and my lord spoke highly of Homer. JOHNSON. 'He had all the
learning of his age. The shield of Achilles shews a nation in war, a
nation in peace; harvest sport, nay stealing.' [Footnote: My note of
this is much too short. Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio. Yet as I
have resolved that THE VERY Journal WHICH DR JOHNSON READ, shall be
presented to the publick, I will not expand the text in any
considerable degree, though I may occasionally supply a word to
complete the sense, as I fill up the blanks of abbreviation in the
writing; neither of which can be said to change the genuine Journal.
One of the best criticks of our age conjectures that the imperfect
passage above has probably been as follows: 'In his book we have an
accurate display of a nation in war, and a nation in peace; the
peasant is delineated as truly as the general; nay, even
harvest-sport, and the modes of ancient theft are described.']
MONBODDO. 'Ay, and what we' (looking to me)?'would call a
parliament-house scene; a cause pleaded.' JOHNSON. 'That is part of
the life of a nation in peace. And there are in Homer such characters
of heroes, and combinations of qualities of heroes, that the united
powers of mankind ever since have not produced any but what are to be
found there.' MONBODDO. 'Yet no character is described.' JOHNSON. 'No;
they all develope themselves. Agamemnon is always a gentleman-like
character; he has always