Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/363

 by Thomas Tyers.

��who had too implicit a confidence in human testimony, followed the newspaper invitation to Cock-lane, in order to detect the imposter, or, if it proved a being of an higher order, and appeared in a questionable shape y to talk with it. Posterity must be per mitted to smile at the credulity of that period 2. Johnson had otherwise a vulnerable side ; for he was one of the few Nonjurors that were left 3, and it was supposed he would never bow the knee to the Baal of Whiggism. This reign, which disdained proscription, began with granting pensions (without requiring their pens) to learned men 4.

Johnson was unconditionally offered one ; but such a turn was given to it by the last mentioned satirical poet, that it might have made him angry or odious, or both. Says Churchill, amongst other passages very entertaining to a neutral reader,

' He damns the pension that he takes, And loves the Stuart he forsakes 5 .'

��Johnson and Douglas, 'the great detector of impostures,' who one night investigated the story of the Cock Lane Ghost, 'sat rather more than an hour ' in the chamber where the spirit was said to be heard. Life, i. 407, n. 3.

1 ' Thou com'st in such a question able shape.' Hamlet, Act i. sc. 4. 1. 43. Johnson, in a note on this passage, says : ' Hamlet, amazed at an apparition which, though in all ages credited, has in all ages been considered as the most wonderful and most dreadful operation of super natural agency, enquires of the spectre in the most emphatick terms why he breaks the order of nature by returning from the dead.'

2 Neither Dr. Douglas nor Horace Walpole, who both went to Cock Lane, had any credulity. Walpole's Letters, iii. 481. For Johnson's state of mind see Life, ii. 150; iv. 298. Posterity, just at present, has enough to do in smiling at the credulity of its own period.

A a

��3 ' Many of my readers,' says Bos- well, ' will be surprised when I men tion that Johnson assured me he had never in his life been in a non-juring meeting-house.' Ib. iv. 287. For Johnson's low opinion of many of the Nonjurors and his condemnation of their ' perverseness of integrity ' see ib. ii. 321.

4 'The accession of George the Third to the throne of these king doms, opened a new and brighter prospect to men of literary merit, who had been honoured with no mark of royal favour in the preceding reign.' Ib. i. 372. Goldsmith, Smol lett and Sterne had no pension. Hume had one, but he did not need it; and so had Home and Beattie, and what was far worse, Shebbeare. Later on no pension was found for Burns.

5 'He damns the pension which

he takes.'

Churchill's Works, i. 262. See Life, i. 429.

2 Not

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