Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/19

 Opinions, and Occasional Reflections. n

��Upon hearing a lady of his acquaintance commended for her learning, he said : * A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek. My old friend, Mrs. Carter x, said he, could make a pudding, as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handker chief as well as compose a poem.' He thought she was too reserved in conversation upon subjects she was so eminently able to converse upon, which was occasioned by her modesty and fear of giving offence 2.

Being asked whether he had read Mrs. Macaulay's second volume of the History of England ; ' No, Sir,' says he, 'nor her

��' a work was published in London called Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Sou/, ascribed to the late David Hume, Esq. That Hume wrote these Essays, and in tended to publish them, is an inci dent in his life which ought not to be passed over; but it is also part of his history that he repented of the act at the last available mo ment, and suppressed the publication.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 13. See also Letters of Hume to Strahan, pp. 230-3, 355, 362. The work was published not seven years, but one year after his death. In the Essay on Suicide he says : ' Let us here endeavour to restore men to their native liberty by examining all the common arguments against suicide, and shewing that that action may be free from every imputation of guilt or blame, according to the sentiments of all the ancient phi losophers.' Ed. 1777, p. 5. On p. 15 he says : ' When the horror of pain prevails over the love of life ; when a voluntary action anticipates the effects of blind causes, 'tis only in consequence of those powers and principles which he [the supreme creator] has implanted in his creatures.'

I cannot find any account of his

��endeavouring to persuade his friend to shoot himself. Perhaps it was as sumed that the Essay was written for some one man.

1 Life, i. 122, n. 4. * Dr. Johnson maintained to me, contrary to the common notion, that a woman would not be the worse wife for being learned.' Ib. ii. 76. See also ib. v. 226.

stance in a family, where the wife has more knowledge than the hus band ; but it is better it should be so than that there should be no know ledge in the whole house.' Addison's Works, ed. 1864, iv. 319. ' If I had a daughter,' wrote Lord Chester field, ' I would give her as much learning as a boy.' Chesterfield's Letters to A. C. Stanhope, ed. 1817, p. 151.
 * It is, indeed, an unhappy circum

2 She is, no doubt, the Lady meant in the following passage in Sir Charles Grandison (ed. 1754, i. 63), where Miss Byron says : ' Who, I, a woman know anything of Latin and Greek ! I know but one Lady who is mistress of both ; and she finds herself so much an owl among the birds, that she wants of all things to be thought to have unlearned them.'

first

�� �