Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/23

 conversation with intelligent and ingenious persons 1. His first question concerning such as had that character, was ever, What is his conversation 2 ?

Johnson said of the Chattertonian controversy, It is a sword that cuts both ways. It is as wonderful to suppose that a boy of sixteen years old had stored his mind with such a train of images and ideas as he had acquired, as to suppose the poems, with their ease of versification and elegance of language, to have been written by Rowlie in the time of Edward the Fourth 3.

Talking with some persons about allegorical painting, he said, 1 1 had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can shew me in the world V

When a Scotsman was talking against Warburton 5, Johnson said he had more literature than had been imported from Scotland since the days of Buchanan. Upon his mentioning other eminent writers of the Scots, ' These will not do,' said Johnson, * let us have some more of your northern lights, these are mere farthing candles V

A Scotsman upon his introduction to Johnson said : ' I am afraid, Sir, you will not like me, I have the misfortune to come from Scotland.' ' Sir,' answered he, * that is a misfortune ; but such a one as you and the rest of your countrymen cannot help V

1 Life, ii. 361 ; iii. 22. On this saying Mr. Pattison re-

2 Ib. iv. 19. marks: * A modest admission, yet

3 ' Johnson said of Chatterton, strictly true, even understood of bare "This is the most extraordinary quantity. But Johnson was not young man that has encountered my thinking of volumes by number. He knowledge. It is wonderful how the knew that Warburton's readings whelp has written such things." ' ranged over whole classes of books Ib. iii. 51. into which he himself had barely

4 For his feelings towards art see dipped.' Mark Pattison's Essays, ib. i. 363, n. 3, and ante, i. 214. ed. 1889, ii. 122. On p. 131 Pattison

5 Fielding, addressing Learning, says that Bishop Newton, in his says : ' Give me a while that key to parallel between Jortin and War- all thy treasures which to thy War- burton, ' adds that Jortin " was per- burton thou hast entrusted.' Tom haps the better Greek and Latin Jones, Bk. xiii. ch. i. (Warburton scholar." "Better" implies corn- was the nephew by marriage of parison. The fact was that Jortin Fielding's patron, Allen.) Johnson was a scholar in every sense of the told George III that 'he had not word; Warburton in none.'

read much compared with Dr. War- 6 Life, v. 57, 80. burton.' Life, ii. 36. 7 The Scotsman was Boswell ; for

To

�� �