Surely He who hath been with him from his youth up hath not sent him into England for nothing.' In the Public Advertiser for Oct. 4 there is the following entry, inserted no doubt by Boswell:--'On Sunday last General Paoli, accompanied by James Boswell, Esq., took an airing in Hyde Park in his coach.' Priors Goldsmith, i. 450. Horace Walpole writes:--'Paoli's character had been so advantageously exaggerated by Mr. Boswell's enthusiastic and entertaining account of him, that the Opposition were ready to incorporate him in the list of popular tribunes. The Court artfully intercepted the project; and deeming patriots of all nations equally corruptible, bestowed a pension of L1000 a year on the unheroic fugitive.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iii. 387.
[211] Johnson, writes Mrs. Piozzi (Anec., p. 228), ridiculed a friend 'who, looking out on Streatham Common from our windows, lamented the enormous wickedness of the times, because some bird-catchers were busy there one fine Sunday morning. "While half the Christian world is permitted," said Johnson, "to dance and sing and celebrate Sunday as a day of festivity, how comes your puritanical spirit so offended with frivolous and empty deviations from exactness? Whoever loads life with unnecessary scruples, Sir," continued he, "provokes the attention of others on his conduct, and incurs the censure of singularity, without reaping the reward of superior virtue."' See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 20, 1773.
[212] The first edition of Hume's History of England was full of Scotticisms, many of which he corrected in subsequent editions. MALONE. According to Mr. J. H. Burton (Life of Hume, ii. 79), 'He appears to have earnestly solicited the aid of Lyttelton, Mallet, and others, whose experience of English composition might enable them to detect Scotticisms.' Mr. Burton gives instances of alterations made in the second edition. He says also that 'in none of his historical or philosophical writings does any expression used by him, unless in those cases where a Scotticism has escaped his vigilance, betray either the district or the county of his origin.' Ib i. 9. Hume was shown in manuscript Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind. Though it was an attack on his own philosophy, yet in reading it 'he kept,' he says, 'a watchful eye all along over the style,' so that he might point out any Scotticisms. Ib ii. 154. Nevertheless, as Dugald Stewart says in his Life of Robertson (p. 214), 'Hume fails frequently both in purity and grammatical correctness.' Even in his later letters I have noticed Scotticisms.
[213] In 1763 Wilkes, as author of The North Briton, No. 45, had been arrested on 'a general warrant directed to four messengers to take up any persons without naming or describing them with any certainty, and to bring them, together with their papers.' Such a warrant as this Chief Justice Pratt (Lord Camden) declared to be 'unconstitutional, illegal, and absolutely void.' Ann. Reg. vi. 145.
[214] See Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 24, 1773.
[215] In the Spring of this year, at a meeting of the electors of Southwark, 'instructions' had been presented to Mr. Thrale and his brother-member, of which the twelfth was:--'That you promote a bill for shortening the duration of Parliaments.' Gent. Mag. xxxix. 162.
[216] This paradox Johnson had exposed twenty-nine years earlier, in his Life of Sir Francis Drake, Works, vi. 366. In Rasselas, chap. xi., he considers also the same question. Imlac is 'inclined to conclude that, if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.' He then enumerates the advantages which civilisation confers on the Europeans. 'They are surely happy,' said the prince, 'who have all these conveniences.' 'The Europeans,' answered Imlac, 'are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.' Writing to Mrs. Thrale from Skye, Johnson said: 'The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf in a cavity between rocks, where a being born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and rain. Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy, but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.' Piozzi Letters, i. 150. See post, April 21 and May 7, 1773, April 26, 1776, and June 15, 1784.
[217] James Burnet, a Scotch Lord of Session, by the title of Lord Monboddo. 'He was a devout believer in the virtues of the heroic ages, and the deterioration of civilised mankind; a great contemner of luxuries, insomuch that he never used a wheel carriage.' WALTER SCOTT, quoted in Croker's Boswell, p. 227. There is some account of him in Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, ii. 175. In his Origin of Language, to which Boswell refers in his next note, after praising Henry Stephen for his Greek Dictionary, he continues:--'But to compile a dictionary of a barbarous language, such as all the modern are compared with the learned, is a work which a man of real genius, rather than undertake, would choose to die of hunger, the most cruel, it is said, of all deaths.