Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/28

 20 Apophthegms, Sentiments, Opinions, &c.

��Complainers, said he, are always loud and clamorous x.

He thought highly of Mandeville's Treatise on the Hypochron- driacal Disease 2.

He would not allow the verb derange, a word at present much in use, to be an English word. Sir, said a gentleman who had some pretensions to literature, I have seen it in a book. Not in a bound book, said Johnson ; disarrange is the word we ought to use instead of it 3.

He thought very favourably of the profession of the law 4, and said, that the sages thereof, for a long series backward, had been friends to religion. Fortescue says, that their afternoon's employment was the study* of the Scriptures 5.

��kind ; he supposes that he can in struct or amuse them, and the pub- lick to whom he appeals must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.' Life, i. 200. See ante, ii. 7.

1 Ante, i. 315.

2 Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, vulgarly called Hypo in Men, and Vapours in Women, 1711.

Of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees he said : ' I read Mandeville forty, or I believe, fifty years ago. He did not puzzle me ; he opened my views into life very much.' Life, iii. 292. See also Hawkins' s Johnson, p. 263.

3 Neither derange nor disarrange is in Johnson's Dictionary. Of de range he might have said that it was a word ' lately innovated from France without necessity.' Life,

iii. 343-

In a note on ' the wide arch of the rang'd empire,' in Antony and Cleo patra, Act i. sc. i, he says : * It is not easy to guess how Dr. Warbur- ton missed this opportunity of in serting a French word by reading

" And the wide arch Of derang'd empire fall ! " Which, \iderange4wtt an English

��word, would be preferable both to raised and. ranged? Johnson's Shake speare, ed. 1765, vii. 107.

4 Attorneys apparently he did not include in the profession of the law. Life, ii. 126. He had himself wished to become a lawyer. ' Sir (he said) it would have been better that I had been of a profession. I ought to have been a lawyer.' Ib. iii. 309. See ib. i. 134, for his wish to practise in Doctors' Commons.

5 * Quare Justiciarii, postquam se refecerint, totum Diei residuum per- transeunt studendo in Legibus, sa- cram legendo Scripturam, et aliter ad eorum Libitum contemplando, ut Vita ipsorum plus contemplativa vi- deatur quam activa. Sicque quietam illi Vitam agunt ab omni Sollici- tudine et Mundi Turbinibus semo- tam.' Fortescue, De Laudibus, cap. Ii.

'When a lawyer, a warm partisan of Lord Chancellor Eldon, called him one of the pillars of the Church ; " No," said another lawyer, " he may be one of its buttresses ; but certain ly not one of its pillars, for he is never found within it." ' Twiss's Life of Eldon, ed. 1844, iii. 488.

�� �