Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/367

 Anecdotes.

��the contemplation of his own uncouth form and figure, he did not like another man much the less for being a coxcomb x. I mentioned two friends who were particularly fond of looking at themselves in a glass ' They do not surprise me at all by so doing (said Johnson) : they see, reflected in that glass, men who have risen from almost the lowest situations in life ; one to enormous riches, the other to every thing this world can give rank, fame, and fortune. They see likewise, men who have merited their advancement by the exertion and improvement of those talents which God had given them ; and I see not why they should avoid the mirror 2. J

The other singularity I promised to record, is this : That though a man of obscure birth himself, his partiality to people of family was visible on every occasion ; his zeal for subordination warm even to bigotry 3 ; his hatred to innovation 4, and reverence

��1 * Johnson said foppery was never cured ; it was the bad stamina of the mind, which like those of the body were never rectified, once a coxcomb, and always a coxcomb.' Life, ii. 128.

2 The first of these men, Mrs. Piozzi says, was John Cator, one of her husband's executors, and the second Alexander Wedderburne, Lord Loughborough and Earl of Rosslyn. Hayward's Piozzi, i. 296. Cator, likely enough, was the man men tioned in the following passage: 1 Mrs. Thrale mentioned a gentleman who had acquired a fortune of four thousand a year in trade, but was absolutely miserable, because he could not talk in company ; so miserable, that he was impelled to lament his situation in the street to and who he knows despises him. " I am a most unhappy man (said he). I am invited to conversations. I go to conversations ; but, alas ! I have no conversation." JOHNSON. " Man commonly cannot be suc
 * [? Seward], whom he hates,

��cessful in different ways. This gentleman has spent, in getting four thousand pounds a year, the time in which he might have learnt to talk ; and now he cannot talk." Mr. Per kins made a shrewd and droll re mark : " If he had got his four thousand a year as a mountebank, he might have learnt to talk at the same time that he was getting his fortune." ' Life, iv. 83. For a specimen of his talk see Letters, ii. 217, n. i.

Of Wedderburne's rise Boswell says: 'When 1 look back on this noble person at Edinburgh, in situa tions so unworthy of his brilliant powers, and behold LORD LOUGH- BOROUGH at London, the change seems almost like one of the meta morphoses in (.. vid? Life, i. 387.

3 ' I heard Dr. Johnson once say, " I have great merit in being zealous for subordination and the honours of birth ; for I can hardly tell who was my grandfather." ' Ib. ii. 261.

4 ' He said to Sir William Scott, " The age is running mad after inno vation ; all the business of the world

for

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