Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/283

226 "A waste of genius in the toil of Knolles—"

for by the educated part of the community the subject would have been welcomed as an useful antidote against the return of those times, the signs of which are portentous in the horizon, when a certain Baronet, whose name— "t' oblivion better were consigned,"

actually moves in his place, in the Commons—that the House of Peers be abolished.—By the way, for a moiety of the impertinence displayed in the document alluded to, in which these mental cultivators indirectly intimate to his Majesty, that he was poaching on their manor, would not Cromwell have shipped off such consequential coxcombs in the expedition under Penn and Venables? with, or without commissions, assigning as an orthodox reason, that—"Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the backs of fools."

These reflections arose not from any desire to undervalue the labours of Dr. Johnson, whole pages of whose works Johan Horrins has by heart, or to hold cheap those benevolent qualities, which his patience with the testy blind gentlewoman, Mrs. Williams, and even his consideration for his poor old cat, may illustrate, but were suggested by the extraordinary disparity between the Moralist and the Monarch, in the important article of self-control: the value of which a philosopher of the world, like Lord Chesterfield, and a spiritual preceptor, are equally prepared to demonstrate, though not from the same premises. We learn that Ursa major when going to be introduced to the old Laird of Auchenleek, was entreated and