Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/49

 the pill very prettily so much for Baretti x ! Johnson, you are the very man Lord Chesterfield describes : a Hottentot indeed 2, and tho' your abilities are respectable, you never can be respected yourself. He has the aspect of an Idiot, without the faintest ray of sense gleaming from any one feature with the most awkward garb, and unpowdered grey wig, on one side only of his head he is for ever dancing the devil's jig, and sometimes he makes the most driveling effort to whistle some thought in his absent paroxisms 3. He came up to me and took me by the hand, then sat down on a sofa, and mumbled out that he had heard two papers had appeared against him in the course of this week one of which was that he was to go to Ireland next .summer in order to abuse the hospitality of that place also 4. His awkwardness at table is just what Chesterfield described, and his roughness of manners kept pace with that. When Mrs. Thrale quoted something from Foster's Sermons, he flew in a passion and said that Foster was a man of mean ability, and of no original thinking 5. All which tho' I took to be most true, yet I held it not meet to have it so set down. He said that he looked upon Burke to be the author of Junius, and that though he would not take him contra mundum, yet he would take him against any man 6. Baretti was of the same mind,

��1 Mrs. Thrale thus ends- some lines 4 He was charged with having she wrote on Baretti : abused the hospitality of the Scotch

' While tenderness, temper and in \i\sjourney to the Western Islands

truth he despises, just published. Life, ii. 305. Of

And only the triumph of victory Ireland he said : ' It is the last

prizes, place where I should wish to travel

Yet let us be candid, and where. . . Yet he had a kindness for the

shall we find Irish nation.' Ib. iii. 410.

So active, so able, so ardent a 5 ' Mr. Beauclerk one day repeated

mind ? to Dr. Johnson Pope's lines,

To your children more soft, more " Let modest Foster, if he will,

polite with your servant, excel

More firm in distress, or in friend- Ten metropolitans in preaching

ship more fervent ? ' well " ;

Hayward's Piozzi, 2nd ed. ii. 177. then asked the Doctor, "Why did

2 It was not Johnson that Chester- Pope say this?" JOHNSON. "Sir, field described. Ante, i. 384, 451; he hoped it would vex somebody." ' Life, i. 267, n. 2. Ib. iv. 9.

3 Life, iii. 357. 6 * JOHNSON. " I should have be-

tho'

�� �