108. At Inverary, the Duke and Duchess of Argyle shewed him great attention. Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 25. In fact, all through his Scotch tour he was most politely welcomed by 'the great.' At Chatsworth, he was 'honestly pressed to stay' by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (post, Sept. 9, 1784). See ante, iii. 21. On the other hand, Mrs. Barbauld says:--'I believe it is true that in England genius and learning obtain less personal notice than in most other parts of Europe.' She censures 'the contemptuous manner in which Lady Wortley Montagu mentioned Richardson:--"The doors of the Great," she says, "were never opened to him."' Richardson Corres. i. clxxiv.
[377] When Lord Elibank was seventy years old, he wrote:--'I shall be glad to go five hundred miles to enjoy a day of his company.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 12.
[378] Romans, x. 2.
[379] I Peter, iii. 15.
[380] Horace Walpole wrote three years earlier:--' Whig principles are founded on sense; a Whig may be a fool, a Tory must be so.' Letters, vii. 88.
[381] Mr. Barclay, a descendant of Robert Barclay, of Ury, the celebrated apologist of the people called Quakers, and remarkable for maintaining the principles of his venerable progenitor, with as much of the elegance of modern manners, as is consistent with primitive simplicity, BOSWELL.
[382] Now Bishop of Llandaff, one of the poorest Bishopricks in this kingdom. His Lordship has written with much zeal to show the propriety of equalizing the revenues of Bishops. He has informed us that he has burnt all his chemical papers. The friends of our excellent constitution, now assailed on every side by innovators and levellers, would have less regretted the suppression of some of this Lordship's other writings. BOSWELL. Boswell refers to A Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury by Richard, Lord Bishop of Landaff, 1782. If the revenues were made more equal, 'the poorer Bishops,' the Bishop writes, 'would be freed from the necessity of holding ecclesiastical preferments in commendam with their Bishopricks,' p. 8.
[383] De Quincey says that Sir Humphry Davy told him, 'that he could scarcely imagine a time, or a condition of the science, in which the Bishop's Essays would be superannuated.' De Quincey's Works, ii. 106. De Quincey describes the Bishop as being 'always a discontented man, a railer at the government and the age, which could permit such as his to pine away ingloriously in one of the humblest among the Bishopricks.' Ib. p. 107. He was, he adds, 'a true Whig,' and would have been made Archbishop of York had his party staid in power a little longer in 1807.'
[384] Rasselas, chap. xi.
[385] See Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 30.
[386] 'They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.' Genesis, iii. 8.
[387]
... 'Vivendi recte qui prorogat horam, Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.'
'And sure the man who has it in his power To practise virtue, and protracts the hour, Waits like the rustic till the river dried; Still glides the river, and will ever glide.'
FRANCIS. Horace, Epist. i. 2. 41.
[388] See ante, p. 59.
[389] See ante, iii. 251.
[390] See ante, iii. 136.
[391] This assertion is disproved by a comparison of dates. The first four satires of Young were published in 1725; The South Sea scheme (which appears to be meant,) was in 1720. MALONE. In Croft's Life of Young, which Johnson adopted, it is stated:--'By the Universal Passion he acquired no vulgar fortune, more than L3000. A considerable sum had already been swallowed up in the South Sea.' Johnson's Works, viii. 430. Some of Young's poems were published before 1720.
[392] Crabbe got Johnson to revise his poem, The Village (post, under March 23, 1783). He states, that 'the Doctor did not readily comply with requests for his opinion; not from any unwillingness to oblige, but from a painful contention in his mind between a desire of giving pleasure and a determination to speak truth.' Crabbe's Works, ii. 12. See ante, ii. 51, 195, and iii. 373.
[393] Pope's Essay on Man, iv. 390. See ante, iii. 6, note 2.
[394] He had within the last seven weeks gone up drunk, at least twice, to a lady's drawing-room. Ante, pp. 88, note 1, and 109.
[395] Mr. Croker, though without any authority, prints unconscious.
[396] I Corinthians, ix. 27. See ante, 295.
[397] 'We walk by faith, not by sight.' 2 Corinthians, v. 7
[398] Dr. Ogden, in his second sermon On the Articles of the Christian Faith, with admirable acuteness thus addresses the opposers of that Doctrine, which accounts for the confusion, sin and misery, which we find in this life: 'It would be severe in GOD, you think, to degrade us to such a sad state as this, for the offence of our first parents: but you can allow him to place us in it without any inducement. Are our calamities lessened for not being ascribed to Adam? If your condition be unhappy, is it not still unhappy, whatever was the occasion? with the aggravation of this reflection, that if it was as good as it was at first designed, there seems to be somewhat the less reason to look for its amendment.' BOSWELL.