Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/87

 EXTRACTS

FROM SIR JOHN HA WKINS'S LIFE OF JOHNSON

��, [ACCORDING to Miss Hawkins (Memoirs, i. 158) Strahan and Cadell called on her father, in the name of the booksellers, ' who meant to collect and publish Johnson's works, and had com missioned them to ask him to write the Life, and to oversee the whole publication. They offered him 200.'

For Boswell's account of Hawkins's book see Life, i. 26.

profession he did not succeed. Having married a gentlewoman who by her brother's death proved a considerable fortune he bought a house at Twickenham, intending to give himself up to his studies and music, of which he was very fond. He now commenced a justice of peace ; and being a very honest moral man, but of no brightness, and very obstinate and contentious, he grew hated by the lower class and very troublesome to the gentry, with whom he went to law both on public and private causes ; at the same time collecting materials indefatigably for a History of Music.' Horace Walpole's Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 421.
 * Sir John Hawkins was originally bred a lawyer, in which

Horace Walpole, writing on Dec. 3, 1776, of Hawkins's History of Music, says (Letters, vi. 395) : ' I have been three days at Strawberry and have not seen a creature but Sir John Hawkins's five volumes, the two last of which, thumping as they are, I literally did read in two days. They are old books to all intents and purposes, very old books ; and what is new is like old books too, that is, full of minute facts that delight anti quaries. . . . My friend, Sir John, is a matter-of-fact-man, and

does

�� �