Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/219

 Anecdotes.

��it easily proves : besides, stop at what point you will, you find yourself as far from infinitude as ever.' These passages I wrote down as soon as I had heard them, and repent that I did not take the same method with a dissertation he made one other day that he was very ill, concerning the peculiar properties of the number Sixteen, which I afterwards tried, but in vain, to make him repeat.

As ethics or figures, or metaphysical reasoning *, was the sort of talk he most delighted in, so no kind of conversation pleased him less I think, than when the subject was historical fact or general polity. * What shall we learn from that stuff (said he) 2 ?

��1 He told Boswell that ' at Oxford the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much even in that way.' Life, i. 70. See ante, p. 17, for his prayer on the study of philosophy.

Mackintosh believed that he was withheld from metaphysics ' partly by a secret dread that it might dis turb those prejudices in which his mind had found repose from the agitations of doubt.' Life of Mackin tosh, ii. 171.

2 In a note on the Life, iii. 206, I have stated that ' he was no doubt sick of the constant reference made by writers and public speakers to Rome/ It was the cant of the age. Voltaire says : * Les membres du parlement d'Angleterre aiment a se comparer aux anciens Remains au- tant qu'ils le peuvent.' (Euvres, ed. 1819, xxiv. 33. Chesterfield writes to his son : ' Bring no precedents from the virtuous Spartans, the polite Athenians, and the brave Romans. Leave all that to futile pedants.' Letters, iii. 236.

Horace Walpole thus ridicules such talk as this (Letters, v. 235):'! entertain myself with the idea of a future senate in Carolina and Vir

��ginia, where their future patriots will harangue on the austere and in corruptible virtue of the ancient English ! will tell their auditors of our disinterestedness and scorn of bribes and pensions, and make us blush in our graves at their ridiculous panegyrics.'

Thomson's Liberty has a great deal of this cant about ' old virtuous Rome' (Part v. 1. 229), and so has B olingbroke' s Dissertation upon Par ties.

Johnson seriously thought of trans lating De Thou's Historia sui Tem- poris, ' which contains the history of only sixty-four years, yet, it has been calculated, would require twelve months, at four hours a day, for its perusal.' Patti son's Isaac Casaubon, ed. 1892, p. 59. In a list of books proper for a young man to study, drawn up by Johnson, many histories are included. Life, iv. 311. In the talk between him and Lord Mon- boddo on Aug. 21, 1773, Monboddo said : ' The history of manners is the most valuable. I never set a high value on any other history.' Johnson replied : * Nor I ; and therefore I esteem biography as giving us what comes near to our-

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