Never use that phrase again.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 84.
[649] 'Turn not thou away.' St. Matthew, v. 42.
[650] I think it necessary to caution my readers against concluding that in this or any other conversation of Dr. Johnson, they have his serious and deliberate opinion on the subject of duelling. In my Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 3 ed. p. 386 [p. 366, Oct. 24], it appears that he made this frank confession:--'Nobody at times, talks more laxly than I do;' and, ib. p. 231 [Sept. 19, 1773], 'He fairly owned he could not explain the rationality of duelling.' We may, therefore, infer, that he could not think that justifiable, which seems so inconsistent with the spirit of the Gospel. At the same time it must be confessed, that from the prevalent notions of honour, a gentleman who receives a challenge is reduced to a dreadful alternative. A remarkable instance of this is furnished by a clause in the will of the late Colonel Thomas, of the Guards, written the night before he fell in a duel, Sept. 3, 1783:--'In the first place, I commit my soul to Almighty GOD, in hopes of his mercy and pardon for the irreligious step I now (in compliance with the unwarrantable customs of this wicked world) put myself under the necessity of taking.' BOSWELL. See ante, ii. 179.
[651] See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 24 and Sept. 20. Dr. Franklin (Memoirs, i. 177) says that when the assembly at Philadelphia, the majority of which were Quakers, was asked by New England to supply powder for some garrison, 'they would not grant money to buy powder, because that was an ingredient of war; but they voted an aid of L3000 to be appropriated for the purchase of bread, flour, wheat, or other grain.' The Governor interpreted other grain as gunpowder, without any objection ever being raised.
[652] 'A gentleman falling off his horse brake his neck, which sudden hap gave occasion of much speech of his former life, and some in this judging world judged the worst. In which respect a good friend made this good epitaph, remembering that of Saint Augustine, Misericordia Domini inter pontem et fontem.
"My friend judge not me, Thou seest I judge not thee; Betwixt the stirrop and the ground, Mercy I askt, mercy I found."'
Camden's Remains, ed. 1870, p. 420.
[653] 'In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.' Prayer-book.
[654] Upon this objection the Reverend Mr. Ralph Churton, Fellow of Brazennose College, Oxford, has favoured me with the following satisfactory observation:--'The passage in the Burial-service does not mean the resurrection of the person interred, but the general resurrection; it is in sure and certain hope of the resurrection; not his resurrection. Where the deceased is really spoken of, the expression is very different, "as our hope is this our brother doth" [rest in Christ]; a mode of speech consistent with every thing but absolute certainty that the person departed doth not rest in Christ, which no one can be assured of, without immediate revelation from Heaven. In the first of these places also, "eternal life" does not necessarily mean eternity of bliss, but merely the eternity of the state, whether in happiness or in misery, to ensue upon the resurrection; which is probably the sense of "the life everlasting," in the Apostles' Creed. See Wheatly and Bennet on the Common Prayer.' BOSWELL.
[655] Six days earlier the Lord-Advocate Dundas had brought in a bill for the Regulation of the Government of India. Hastings, he said, should be recalled. His place should be filled by 'a person of independent fortune, who had not for object the repairing of his estate in India, that had long been the nursery of ruined and decayed fortunes.' Parl. Hist. xxiii. 757. Johnson wrote to Dr. Taylor on Nov. 22 of this year:--'I believe corruption and oppression are in India at an enormous height, but it has never appeared that they were promoted by the Directors, who, I believe, see themselves defrauded, while the country is plundered; but the distance puts their officers out of reach.' Notes and Queries, 6th S. v. 482. See ante, p. 66.
[656] See ante, p. 113.
[657] Stockdale (Memoirs, ii. 57) says that, in 1770, the payment to writers in the Critical Review was two guineas a sheet, but that some of the writers in The Monthly Review received four guineas a sheet. As these Reviews were octavos, each sheet contained sixteen pages. Lord Jeffrey says that the writers in the Edinburgh Review were at first paid ten guineas a sheet. 'Not long after the minimum was raised to sixteen guineas, at which it remained during my reign, though two-thirds of the articles were paid much higher--averaging, I should think, from twenty to twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number.' Cockburn's Jeffrey, i. 136.
[658] See ante, ii. 344.
[659] See ante, iii.32.
[660] See ante, p. 206.
[661] Monday is no doubt put by mistake for Tuesday, which was the 29th. Boswell had spent a considerable part of Monday the 28th with Johnson (ante, p.