[248] Johnson ten years earlier told Boswell that he loved most 'the biographical part of literature.' Ante, i. 425. Goldsmith said of biography:--'It furnishes us with an opportunity of giving advice freely and without offence.... Counsels as well as compliments are best conveyed in an indirect and oblique manner, and this renders biography as well as fable a most convenient vehicle for instruction. An ingenious gentleman was asked what was the best lesson for youth; he answered, "The life of a good man." Being again asked what was the next best, he replied, "The life of a bad one."' Prior's Goldsmith, i. 395.
[249] See ante, p. 57.
[250] Ten years later he said:--'There is now a great deal more learning in the world than there was formerly; for it is universally diffused.' Ante, April 29,1783. Windham (Diary, p. 17) records 'Johnson's opinion that I could not name above five of my college acquaintances who read Latin with sufficient ease to make it pleasurable.'
[251] See ante, ii. 352.
[252] 'Warburton, whatever was his motive, undertook without solicitation to rescue Pope from the talons of Crousaz, by freeing him from the imputation of favouring fatality, or rejecting revelation; and from month to month continued a vindication of the Essay on Man in the literary journal of that time, called the Republick of Letters' Johnson's Works, viii. 289. Pope wrote to Warburton of the Essay on Man:--'You understand my work better than I do myself.' Pope's Works, ed. 1886, ix. 211.
[253] See ante, ii. 37, note I, and Pope's Works, ed. 1886, ix. 220. Allen was Ralph Allen of Prior Park near Bath, to whom Fielding dedicated Amelia, and who is said to have been the original of Allworthy in Tom Jones. It was he of whom Pope wrote:--
'Let low-born Allen, with an awkward shame, Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame.'
Epilogue to the Satires, i. 135.
Low-born in later editions was changed to humble. Warburton not only married his niece, but, on his death, became in her right owner of Prior Park.
[254] Mr. Mark Pattison (Satires of Pope, p. 158) points out Warburton's 'want of penetration in that subject [metaphysics] which he considered more peculiarly his own.' He said of 'the late Mr. Baxter' (Andrew Baxter, not Richard Baxter), that 'a few pages of his reasoning have not only more sense and substance than all the elegant discourses of Dr. Berkeley, but infinitely better entitle him to the character of a great genius.'
[255] It is of Warburton that Churchill wrote in The Duellist (Poems, ed. 1766, ii. 82):--
'To prove his faith which all admit Is at least equal to his wit, And make himself a man of note, He in defence of Scripture wrote; So long he wrote, and long about it, That e'en believers 'gan to doubt it.'
[256] I find some doubt has been entertained concerning Dr. Johnson's meaning here. It is to be supposed that he meant, 'when a king shall again be entertained in Scotland.' BOSWELL.
[257] Perhaps among these ladies was the Miss Burnet of Monboddo, on whom Burns wrote an elegy.
[258] In the Rambler, No. 98, entitled The Necessity of Cultivating Politeness, Johnson says:--'The universal axiom in which all complaisance is included, and from which flow all the formalities which custom has established in civilized nations, is, That no man shall give any preference to himself.' In the same paper, he says that 'unnecessarily to obtrude unpleasing ideas is a species of oppression.'
[259] Act ii. sc. 5.
[260] Perhaps he was referring to Polyphemus's club, which was
'Of height and bulk so vast The largest ship might claim it for a mast.'
Pope's Odyssey, ix. 382.
Or to Agamemnon's sceptre:--
'Which never more shall leaves or blossoms bear.'
Iliad, i. 310.
[261] 'We agreed pretty well, only we disputed in adjusting the claims of merit between a shopkeeper of London and a savage of the American wildernesses. Our opinions were, I think, maintained on both sides without full conviction; Monboddo declared boldly for the savage, and I, perhaps for that reason, sided with the citizen.' Piozzi Letters, i. 115.
[262]
'Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed, From Macedonia's madman to the Swede; The whole strange purpose of their lives to find, Or make, an enemy of all mankind! Not one looks backward, onward still he goes, Yet ne'er looks forward further than his nose.'
Essay on Man, iv. 219.
[263] Maccaroni is not in Johnson's Dictionary. Horace Walpole (Letters, iv. 178) on Feb. 6, 1764, mentions 'the Maccaroni Club, which is composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses.' On the following Dec. 16 he says:--'The Maccaroni Club has quite absorbed Arthur's; for, you know, old fools will hobble after young ones.' Ib. p. 302. See post, Sept. 12, for buck.
[264] 'We came late to Aberdeen, where I found my dear mistress's letter, and learned that all our little people were happily recovered of the measles.