208.
[351] See ante, iii. 382, note 1.
[352] Next day I endeavoured to give what had happened the most ingenious turn I could, by the following verses:--
To THE HONOURABLE Miss MONCKTON.
'Not that with th' excellent Montrose I had the happiness to dine; Not that I late from table rose, From Graham's wit, from generous wine.
It was not these alone which led On sacred manners to encroach; And made me feel what most I dread, JOHNSON'S just frown, and self-reproach.
But when I enter'd, not abash'd, From your bright eyes were shot such rays, At once intoxication flash'd, And all my frame was in a blaze.
But not a brilliant blaze I own, Of the dull smoke I'm yet asham'd; I was a dreary ruin grown, And not enlighten'd though inflam'd.
Victim at once to wine and love, I hope, MARIA, you'll forgive; While I invoke the powers above, That henceforth I may wiser live.'
The lady was generously forgiving, returned me an obliging answer, and I thus obtained an Act of Oblivion, and took care never to offend again. BOSWELL.
[353] See ante, ii. 436, and iv. 88, note I.
[354] On May 22 Horace Walpole wrote (Letters, viii. 44):--'Boswell, that quintessence of busybodies, called on me last week, and was let in, which he should not have been, could I have foreseen it. After tapping many topics, to which I made as dry answers as an unbribed oracle, he vented his errand. "Had I seen Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets?" I said slightly, "No, not yet;" and so overlaid his whole impertinence.'
[355] See ante, iii. 1.
[356] See ante, ii. 47, note 2; 352, note I; and iii. 376, for explanations of like instances of Boswell's neglect.
[357] See ante, i. 298, note 4.
[358] 'He owned he sometimes talked for victory.' Boswell's Hebrides, opening pages.
[359] The late Right Hon. William Gerard Hamilton. MALONE.
[360] Dr. Johnson, being told of a man who was thankful for being introduced to him, 'as he had been convinced in a long dispute that an opinion which he had embraced as a settled truth was no better than a vulgar error, "Nay," said he, "do not let him be thankful, for he was right, and I was wrong." Like his Uncle Andrew in the ring at Smithfield, Johnson, in a circle of disputants, was determined neither to be thrown nor conquered.' Murphy's Johnson, p. 139. Johnson, in The Adventurer, No. 85, seems to describe his own talk. He writes:--' While the various opportunities of conversation invite us to try every mode of argument, and every art of recommending our sentiments, we are frequently betrayed to the use of such as are not in themselves strictly defensible; a man heated in talk, and eager of victory, takes advantage of the mistakes or ignorance of his adversary, lays hold of concessions to which he knows he has no right, and urges proofs likely to prevail on his opponent, though he knows himself that they have no force.' J. S. Mill gives somewhat the same account of his own father. 'I am inclined to think,' he writes, 'that he did injustice to his own opinions by the unconscious exaggerations of an intellect emphatically polemical; and that when thinking without an adversary in view, he was willing to make room for a great portion of the truths he seemed to deny.' Mill's Autobiography, p. 201. See also ante, ii. 100, 450, in. 23, 277, 331; and post, May 18, 1784, and Steevens's account of Johnson just before June 22, 1784.
[361] Thomas Shaw, D.D., author of Travels to Barbary and the Levant.
[362] See ante, iii. 314.
[363] The friend very likely was Boswell himself. He was one of 'these tanti men.' 'I told Paoli that in the very heat of youth I felt the nom est tanti, the omnia vanitas of one who has exhausted all the sweets of his being, and is weary with dull repetition. I told him that I had almost become for ever incapable of taking a part in active life.' Boswell's Corsica, ed. 1879, p. 193.
[364] Letters on the English Nation: By Batista Angeloni, a Jesuit, who resided many years in London. Translated from the original Italian by the Author of the Marriage Act. A Novel. 2 vols. London [no printer's name given], 1755. Shebbeare published besides six Letters to the People of England in the years 1755-7, for the last of which he was sentenced to the pillory. Ante, iii. 315, note I. Horace Walpole (Letters, iii. 74) described him in 1757 as 'a broken Jacobite physician, who has threatened to write himself into a place or the pillory.'
[365] I recollect a ludicrous paragraph in the newspapers, that the King had pensioned both a He-bear and a She-bear. BOSWELL. See ante, ii. 66, and post, April 28, 1783.
[366]
Witness, ye chosen train Who breathe the sweets of his Saturnian reign; Witness ye Hills, ye Johnsons, Scots, Shebbeares, Hark to my call, for some of you have ears.'
Heroic Epistle. See post, under June 16, 1784.
[367] In this he was unlike the King, who, writes Horace Walpole,' expecting only an attack on Chambers, bought it to tease, and began reading it to, him; but, finding it more bitter on himself, flung it down on the floor in a passion, and would read no more.' Journal of the Reign of George III, i.