In the following September, in a fit of madness, he made away with himself.
[391] See post, May 8, 1781.
[392] Horace Walpole, writing in May, 1764, says:--'The Earl of Northumberland returned from Ireland, where his profusion and ostentation had been so great that it seemed to lay a dangerous precedent for succeeding governors.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 417. He was created Duke in 1766. For some pleasant anecdotes about this nobleman and Goldsmith, see Goldsmith's Misc. Works, i. 66, and Forster's Goldsmith, i. 379, and ii. 227.
[393] Johnson thus writes of him (Works, viii. 207):--'The Archbishop of Dublin gave him at first some disturbance in the exercise of his jurisdiction; but it was soon discovered that between prudence and integrity he was seldom in the wrong; and that, when he was right, his spirit did not easily yield to opposition.' He adds: 'He delivered Ireland from plunder and oppression, and showed that wit confederated with truth had such force as authority was unable to resist. He said truly of himself that Ireland "was his debtor." It was from the time when he first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity.' Ib p. 319. Pope, in his Imitations of Horace, II. i. 221, says:--
'Let Ireland tell how wit upheld her cause, Her trade supported, and supplied her laws; And leave on Swift this grateful verse engraved, "The rights a Court attacked, a poet saved."'
[394] These lines have been discovered by the author's second son in the London Magazine for July 1732, where they form part of a poem on Retirement, copied, with some slight variations, from one of Walsh's smaller poems, entitled The Retirement. They exhibit another proof that Johnson retained in his memory fragments of neglected poetry. In quoting verses of that description, he appears by a slight variation to have sometimes given them a moral turn, and to have dexterously adapted them to his own sentiments, where the original had a very different tendency. In 1782, when he was at Brighthelmstone, he repeated to Mr. Metcalfe, some verses, as very characteristic of a celebrated historian [Gibbon]. They are found among some anonymous poems appended to the second volume of a collection frequently printed by Lintot, under the title of Pope's Miscellanies:--
'See how the wand'ring Danube flows, Realms and religions parting; A friend to all true Christian foes, To Peter, Jack, and Martin. Now Protestant, and Papist now, Not constant long to either, At length an infidel does grow, And ends his journey neither. Thus many a youth I've known set out, Half Protestant, half Papist, And rambling long the world about, Turn infidel or atheist.'
MALONE. See post, 1780, in Mr. Langton's Collection, and Boswell's Hebrides Aug. 27, and Oct. 28, 1773.
[395] Juvenal, Sat. iii. 1. 2.
'Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend.'
Johnson's London, 1. 3.
[396] It was published without the authors name.
[397] 'What have we acquired? What but ... an island thrown aside from human use; ... an island which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation.' Works, vi. 198.
[398] 'It is wonderful with what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game, a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the most successful field, but they die upon the bed of honour, "resign their lives, amidst the joys of conquest, and, filled with England's glory, smile in death." The life of a modern soldier is ill-represented by heroic fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword.
Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless, and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away.' Works, vi. 199.
[399] Johnson wrote of the Earl of Chatham:--'This surely is a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall at last dismiss him to nameless obscurity, with that equipoise of blame and praise which Corneille allows to Richelieu.' Works, vi. 197.
[400] Ephesians, vi. 12. Johnson (Works, vi. 198) calls Junius 'one of the few writers of his despicable faction whose name does not disgrace the page of an opponent.' But he thus ends his attack;--'What, says Pope, must be the priest where a monkey is the god? What must be the drudge of a party of which the heads are Wilkes and Crosby, Sawbridge and Townsend?' Ib p.