Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/201

 Anecdotes.

��Johnson), there are four or five hundred faults, instead of four or five ; but you do not consider that it would take me up three whole months labour, and when the time was expired, the work would not be done.' When the booksellers set him about it however some years after, he went cheerfully to the business, said he was well paid, and that they deserved to have it done carefully x . His reply to the person who complimented him on its coming out first 2, mentioning the ill success of the French in a similar attempt, is well known ; and, I trust, has been often recorded: 'Why, what would you expect, dear Sir (said he), from fellows that eat frogs 3 ?' I have however often thought Dr. Johnson more free than prudent in professing so loudly his little skill in the Greek language 4 : for though he considered it as a proof of a narrow mind to be too careful of literary reputa tion, yet no man could be more enraged than he, if an enemy, taking advantage of this confession, twitted him with his ignorance ; and I remember when the king of Denmark was in

��corrected even in Todd's edition. 1 It occurs in definition 13 of the verb To sit * Asses are ye that sit in judgment,' Judges, v. 10. The verse is : " Speak, ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment, and walk by the way." '

1 It was published in 1773. Life, ii. 203. On March 4 of that year he wrote of it : ' I have mended some faults, but added little to its useful ness.' Ib. p. 209. I cannot account for the following advertisement which I found in the London Chronicle for Feb. 13-15, 1776. 'A New edition revised by the Author. This day was published in 2 vols. folio, price ^4. 10, bound, the fourth edition of Mr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary!

2 Mrs. Piozzi means of course ' who complimented him when it first came out.'

3 When, on Johnson's undertaking to finish the Dictionary in three

��years, Dr. Adams pointed out that 'the French Academy, which con sists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary? he replied : Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see ; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.' Life, i. 186.

4 Ib. iv. 384.

5 In August, 1768. Horace Wai- pole wrote on the l6th of that month : ' This great King is a very little one; not ugly, nor ill-made. He has the sublime strut of his grandfather [George II] or of a cock- sparrow ; and the divine white eyes of all his family by the mother's side.' Walpole's Letters, v. 122.

6 George Colman was to be Pro fessor of Latin in the College which the Literary Club was to set up in St. Andrews. Life, v. 108.

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