Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/445

 Letters of Dr. Johnson.

��I must beg leave to introduce to your acquaintance Mr. Adams under whom I had the honour to perform exercises at Oxford *, and who has lately recommended himself to the best part of Mankind by his confutation of Hume on Miracles 2.

My Lord Corke is desirous to see Mr. Falkner's letter to me. I wish you would find it him, as by my desire, and when it is returned, take care to keep it for my justification, for I would not have shewn it, but at his own instigation 3.

��says : ' Many there are who look upon his offered compromise with the Porretta family, in allowing the Daughters of the proposed marriage to be brought up by the mother, reserving to himself the Education of the Sons only, as a blot in the character. 5 To lessen criticism Richardson supplies * an unlucky omission ' in one of the letters. Sir Charles Grandison, vi. 410.

Mrs. Barbauld, in her Memoirs of Richardson (Clarissa, vol. i. Preface, p. 41), says: 'The author valued himself upon his management of this nice negotiation ; and, in a letter to one of his French translators, dex terously brings it forward as a proof of his candour and liberality towards the Catholic religion.'

1 This is no contradiction of the statement that Adams was only John son's 'nominal tutor.' Life, i. 79. The 'exercises 'were often performed in the hall, no doubt before the Master and Fellows. Ib. i. 60.

2 'Answering, in the theologic dic tionary, signifies confuting.' Wai- pole's Letters, vii. 158.

' Answers (wrote Hume) by Reve rends and Right Reverends came out two or three in a year.' Letters of Hume to Strahan, Preface, p. 24.

' Dr. Adams told me he had once dined in company with Hume in London ; that Hume shook hands with him, and said, " You have

��treated me much better than I de serve." ' Life, ii. 441.

3 Ireland was first brought under the Copyright Act by the 41 Geo. Ill, c. 107. Letters of Hume to Strahan, p. 176. Gibbon suffered from ' the pirates of Dublin.' Misc. Works, i. 223. Boswell's Life of Johnson was reprinted in Dublin in 1792 in 3 vols. 8vo. George Faulkner, the famous Dublin bookseller, was by agreement with Richardson to print and publish Sir Charles Grandison before it was published in London. Only a few sheets had been sent over, when Richardson found out that some booksellers in Dublin had bribed his servants to steal and send them copies of almost the whole work. Faulkner at once shared in the plunder. ' He also wrote letters to several persons of character in London, endeavouring to justify him self, without having that strict regard to veracity in them which becomes a man of business.' Richardson mentions his letter to Johnson as misrepresenting Letter of yours to
 * this strange, this inconsistent, this

Mr ' Sir Charles Grandison,

vi. pp. 412-433 ; Gentleman's Maga zine, 1753, p. 465. Lord Corke was the fifth Earl, often mentioned in Boswell as Lord Orrery. For George Faulkner, see Life, v. 44; Letters, i. 13. See/<w/, p. 442.

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