Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/371

 chester, talked of it as the very best he ever read. He could have been eminent, if he chose it, in letter writing, a faculty in which, according to Sprat, his Cowley excelled x. His epistolary and confidential correspondence would make an agreeable publica tion, but the world will never be trusted with it 2. He wrote as well in verse as in prose. Though he composed so harmoniously in Latin and English, he had no ear for music 3 : and though he lived in such habits of intimacy with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and once intended to have written the lives of the painters, he had no eye, nor perhaps taste for a picture, nor a landscape 4. He renewed his Greek some years ago, for which he found no occasion for twenty years. He owned that many knew more Greek than himself; but that his grammar would show he had once taken pains. Sir William Jones, one of the most enlightened of the sons of men, as Johnson described him, has often said, he knew a great deal of Greek 5. With French authors he was familiar. He had lately read over the works of Boileau 6. He passed a judgment on Sherlock's French and English letters, and told him there was more French in his English, than English in his French 7. His curiosity would have led him to read Italian, even if Baretti had not been his acquaintance 8. Latin was as natural to him as English. He seemed to know the readiest

1 Johnson says of Sprat's Life of from the French. Horace Walpole Cowley that ' his zeal of friendship or wrote of him (Letters, vii. 462) : ambition of eloquence has produced ' His Italian is ten times worse than a funeral oration rather than a his- his French, and more bald.'

tory.' Works, vii. I. 8 He had learnt Italian before he

2 Less than four years later Mrs. knew Baretti. Life,\. 115, 156. He his letters ; she was followed in three he ' purposed to apply vigorously to years by Boswell, who gave nearly study, particularly of the Greek and 340 more. There are now more than Italian tongues.' Ante, i. 77. In a thousand in print. 1781 he recorded : ' Having prayed,

3 Ante, ii. 103. I purpose to employ the next six

4 Ante, i. 214. weeks upon the Italian language for

5 Life, iv. 384; ante, i. 183. my settled study.' Ante, i. 99. Less

6 Ante, i. 334. than four months before his death he

7 Martin Sherlock first published wrote to Sastres, the Italian master: in Italian and in French the work ' I have hope of standing the Eng- which, in 1781, he brought out in lish winter, and of seeing you, and English under the title of Letters reading Petrarch at Bolt Court.' of an English Traveller translated Letters, ii. 417.

road

�� �