Chapter 371

Berkeley Square, May 26, 1791. (page 500)

I am rich in letters from you: I received that by Lord Elgin's courier first, as you expected, and its elder the next day. You tell me mine entertain you; tant mieux. It is my wish, but my wonder; for I live so little in the world, that I do not know the present generation by sight: for, though I pass by them in the streets, the hats with valences, the folds above the chin of the ladies, and the dirty shirts and shaggy hair of the young men, who have levelled nobility almost as much as the mobility in France have, have confounded all individuality. Besides, if I did go to public places and assemblies, which my going to roost earlier prevents, the bats and owls do not begin to fly abroad till far in the night, when they begin to see and be seen. However, one of the empresses of fashion, the Duchess of Gordon, uses fifteen or sixteen hours of her four-and-twenty. I heard her journal of last Monday. She first went to Handel's music in the Abbey; she then clambered over the benches, and went to Hastings's trial in the Hall; after dinner to the play; then to Lady Lucan's assembly; after that to Ranelagh, and returned to Mrs. Hobart's faro table; gave a ball herself in the evening of that morning, into which she must have got a good way: and set out for Scotland the next day. Hercules could not have achieved a quarter of her labours in the same space of time, What will the Great Duke think of our Amazons, if he has letters opened, as the Emperor was wont! One of our Camillas,(795) but in a freer style, I hear, he saw (I fancy just before your arrival); and he must have wondered at the familiarity of the dame, and the nincompoophood of her Prince. Sir William Hamilton is arrived-- his Nymph of the Attitudes!(796) was too prudish to visit the rambling peeress.

The rest of my letter must be literary; for we have no news. Boswell's book is gossiping;(797) but, having numbers of proper names, would be more readable, at least by me, were it reduced from two volumes to one; but there are woful longueurs, both about his hero and himself; thefidus Achates; about whom one has not the smallest curiosity. But I wrong the original Achates: one is satisfied with his fidelity in keeping his master's secrets and weaknesses, which modern led-captains betray for their patron's glory, and to hurt their own enemies; which Boswell has done shamefully, particularly against Mrs. Piozzi, and Mrs. Montagu, and Bishop Percy. Dr. Blagden says justly, that it is a new kind of libel, by which you may abuse any body, by saying some dead body said so and so of somebody alive. Often, indeed, Johnson made the most brutal speeches to living persons; for though he was good-natured at bottom, he was very ill-natured at top. He loved to dispute, to show his superiority. If his opponents were weak, he told them they were fools; if they vanquished him, be was scurrilous--to nobody more than to Boswell himself, who was contemptible for flattering him so grossly, and for enduring the coarse things he was continually vomiting on Boswell's own country, Scotland. I expected, amongst the excommunicated, to find myself, but am very gently treated. I never would be in the least acquainted with Johnson; or, as Boswell calls it, I had not a just value for him; which the biographer imputes to my resentment for the Doctor's putting bad arguments (purposely, out of Jacobitism,) into the speeches which he wrote fifty years ago for my father, in the Gentleman's Magazine; which I did not read then, or ever knew Johnson wrote till Johnson died, nor have looked at since. Johnson's blind Toryism and known brutality kept me aloof; nor did I ever exchange a syllable with him: nay, I do not think I ever was in a room with him six times in my days. Boswell came to me, said Dr. Johnson was writing the Lives of the Poets, and wished I would give him anecdotes of Mr. Gray. I said, very coldly, I had given what I knew to Mr. Mason. Boswell hummed and hawed, and then dropped, "I suppose you know Dr. Johnson does not admire Mr. Gray." Putting as much contempt as I could Into my look and tone, I said, "Dr. Johnson don't--humph!"--and with that monosyllable ended our interview. After the Doctor's death, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Boswell sent an ambling circular-letter to me, begging subscriptions for a monument for him--the two last, I think, impertinently; as they could not but know my opinion, and could not suppose I would contribute to a monument for one who had endeavoured, poor soul! to degrade my friend's superlative poetry. I would not deign to write an answer; but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, that I Would not subscribe. In the two new volumes Johnson says, and very probably did, or is made to say, that 'Gray's poetry is dull, and that he was a dull man!(798) The same oracle dislikes Prior, Swift, and Fielding. If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy ungraceful animal. Pass to a better chapter!

Burke has published another pamphlet(799) against the French Revolution, in which he attacks it still more grievously. The beginning is very good; but it is not equal, nor quite so injudicious as parts of its predecessor; is far less brilliant, as well as much shorter: but, were it ever so long, his mind overflows with such a torrent of images, that he cannot be tedious. His invective against Rousseau is admirable, just, and new.(799) Voltaire he passes almost contemptuously. I wish he had dissected Mirabeau too; and I grieve that he has omitted the violation of the consciences of the clergy, nor stigmatized those universal plunderers, the National Assembly, who gorge themselves with eighteen livres a-day; which to many of them would, three years ago, have been astonishing opulence.

When you return, I shall lend you three volumes in quarto of another Work,(800) With which you will be delighted. They are state-letters in the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Mary, Elizabeth, and James; being the correspondence of the Talbot and Howard families, given by a Duke of Norfolk to the Herald's-office; where they have lain for a century neglected, buried under dust, and unknown, till discovered by a Mr. Lodge, a genealogist, who, to gratify his passion, procured to be made a poursuivant. Oh! how curious they are! Henry seizes an alderman who refused to contribute to a benevolence: sends him to the army on the borders; orders him to be exposed in the front line; and if that does not do, to be treated with the utmost rigour of military discipline. His daughter Bess is not less a Tudor. The mean, unworthy treatment of the queen of Scots is striking; and you will find Elizabeth's jealousy of her crown and her avarice were at war, and how the more ignoble passion predominated. But the most amusing passage is one in a private letter, as it paints the awe of children for their parents a little differently from modern habitudes. Mr. Talbot, second son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, was a member of the House of Commons, and was married. He writes to the Earl his father, and tells him, that a young woman of a very good character, has been recommended to him for chambermaid to his wife, and if his lordship does not disapprove of it, he will hire her. There are many letters of news, that are very entertaining too--but it is nine o'clock, and I must go to Lady Cecilia's.

Friday.

The Conways, Mrs. Damer, the Farrens, and Lord Mount-Edgcumbe supped at the Johnstones'. Lord Mount-Edgcumbe said excellently, that "Mademoiselle D'Eon is her own widow." I wish I had seen you both in your court-plis, at your presentation; but that is only one wish amongst a thousand.

(795) Lady Craven; who was at this time in Italy with the Margravine of Anspach. Lord Craven died at Lausanne in September, and the lady was married to the Margrave in October following.-E.

(796) Miss Martel married, in the following September, to Sir William Hamilton-the lady, the infatuated attachment to whom has been said to have been "the only cloud that obscured the bright fame Of the immortal Nelson." By the following passage in a letter, written by Romney the painter to Hagley the poet on the 19th of June, it will be seen that she had not been many days in England, before a warm passion for her was engendered in the breast of the artist:--"At present, and for the greatest part of the summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the divine lady: I cannot give her any other epithet; for I think her superior to all womankind. She asked me if you would not write my life: I told her you had begun it-then, she said, she hoped you would have much to say of her in the life; as she prides herself in being my model."-E.

(797) On the first appearance of his most interesting and instructive Life of Dr. Johnson, a considerable outcry was raised against poor Boswell. On the subject of this outcry, Mr. Croker in the introduction to his valuable edition of the work, published in 1831, makes the following excellent observations:-- "Whatever doubts may have existed as to the prudence or the propriety of the original publication--however naturally private confidence was alarmed, or individual vanity offended--the voices of criticism and complaint were soon drowned in the general applause. And, no wonder; the work combines within itself the four most entertaining classes of writing--biography, memoirs, familiar letters, and that assemblage of literary anecdotes, which the French have taught us to distinguish by the termination Ana. It was a strange and fortuitous concurrence, that one so prone to talk, and who talked so well, should be brought into such close contact and confidence with one so zealous and so able to record. Dr. Johnson was a man of extraordinary powers; but Mr. Boswell had qualities, in their own way, almost as rare. He United lively manners with indefatigable diligence, and the volatile curiosity of a man about town with the drudging patience of a chronicler. With a very good opinion of himself, he was quick in discerning, and frank in applauding the excellencies of others. His contemporaries, indeed, not without some colour of reason, occasionally complained of him as vain, troublesome, and giddy; but his vanity was inoffensive--his curiosity was commonly directed towards laudable objects--when he meddled, be did so, generally, from good-natured motives--and his giddiness was only an exuberant gaiety, which never failed in the respect and reverence due to literature, morals, and religion' ' and posterity grate taste, temper, and talents with which he selected, enjoyed, and described that polished intellectual society which still lives in his work, and without his work had perished!" Mr. Croker's edition of the work is the eleventh; and since its appearance, a twelfth, in ten pocket volumes, with embellishments has been given to the world, by Mr. Murray, of which thousands are understood to have been called for. Whenever Walpole, in the course of his correspondence, has had occasion to introduce the name of Boswell, he has uniformly spoken so disparagingly of him, that it is but justice to his memory to append to the above extract, a passage or two, in which other writers have recorded their estimation of him. Mr. Burke told Sir James Mackintosh, that "he thought Johnson appeared greater in Boswell's volumes than even in his own." Sir Walter Scott, speaking of the Doctor, says, "he yet is, in our mind's eye, a personification as lively as that of Siddons in Lady Macbeth, or Kemble in Cardinal Wolsey; and all this arises from his having found in Boswell such a biographer as no man but himself ever had." In the opinion of the Edinburgh Reviewers, Boswell was "the very prince of retail wits and philosophers," and his Life of Johnson is pronounced to be "one of the best books in the world-- a great, a very great work;" while the quarterly Review considers it "the richest dictionary of wit and wisdom, any language can boast, and that to the influence of Boswell we owe, probably, three-fourths of what is most entertaining, as well as no inconsiderable portion of whatever is most instructive, in all the books of memoirs that have subsequently appeared."-E.

(797) Dr. Johnson's attack upon Gray was undoubtedly calculated to give great offence to Walpole: "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where: he was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great: he was a mechanical poet."-E.

(798) This was the "Letter from Mr. Burke to a member of the National Assembly."-E.

(799) "We have had," says Mr. Burke, "the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England. As I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings, almost from day to day, he left no doubt on my mind that he entertained no principle, either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding, but vanity; with this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of madness. Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labour, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which when paid, honours the giver and the receiver: and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation; and then, without one natural pang, casts away as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers."-E.

(800) This was Lodge's "Illustrations of British History, Biography, and Manners, in the Reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, Elizabeth and James the First;" a work which has also been highly praised by Mr. Gifford, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Egerton Brydges, Mr. Park, and others.-E.