Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/385

 by Thomas Tyers.

��discipline, by having passed whole days and nights in the camp, and in the tents, at Warley Common z. He was able to make himself entertaining in his description of what he had seen. A spark was enough to illuminate him. The Giant and the Corsican Fairy were objects of attention to him. The riding- horses in Astley's amphitheatre 2 (no new public amusement, for Homer alludes to it) he went to see; and on the fireworks of Toree he wrote a Latin poem 3.

The study of humanity, as was injuriously said of the great Bentley, had not made him inhuman 4. He never wantonly brandished his formidable weapon 5. He meant to keep his enemies off. He did not mean, as in the advice of Radcliffe to Mead, to ' bully the world, lest the world should bully him 6 .' He seemed to be a man of great clemency to all subordinate beings.

��1 Where a camp was formed in 1778 during the dread of a French and Spanish invasion. Life, iii. 360.

2 ' Of Whitefield he said, "White- field never drew as much attention as a mountebank does ; he did not draw attention by doing better than others, but by doing what was strange. W 7 ere Astley to preach a sermon standing upon his head on a horse's back, he would collect a multitude to hear him ; but no wise man would say he had made a better sermon for that." ' Ib. iii. 409.

3 Ante, ii. 321. This poem is not included in Johnson's Works.

4 ' Bentley having spoken thus, Scaliger bestowing him a sour look : " Miscreant prater," said he, ". . . thy learning makes thee more bar barous, thy study of humanity more inhuman." ' The Battle of the Books. Swift's Works, ed. 1803, iii. 230. There is a play on words here, for humanity in one of its senses meant ' philology ; grammatical studies.'

5 ' I was (wrote Mickle) upwards of twelve years acquainted with Dr. Johnson, was frequently in his com

��pany, always talked with ease to him, and can truly say, that I never re ceived from him one rough word.' Life, iv. 250.

1 An eminent critic,' no doubt Ma- lone, said : * I have been often in his company, and never once heard him say a severe thing to any one. When he did say a severe thing, it was generally extorted by ignorance pretending to knowledge, or by ex treme vanity or affectation.' Jb. iv. 341. ' He never attacked the un assuming, nor meant to terrify the diffident.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary,

ii- 343-

6 < Dr. Radcliffe told Dr. Mead, " Mead, I love you, and now I will tell you a sure secret to make your fortune ; use all mankind ill." As for this maxim he was right. The generality are bullies, and if you do not bully them, they will bully you. Yet nobody ever practised this rule less than Dr. Mead, who, as I have been informed by great physicians, got as much again by his practice as Dr. Radcliffe did.' J. Richardson's Richardsoniana, quoted in Gentle man's Magazine, 1776, p. 373.

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