Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/66

62 honour of unquestionable superiority. “Sir (said he), you are for making a monarchy of what should be a republick.”’ The accusation was true; Boswell acknowledged but one king, and made short work of all possible pretenders. Of these pretenders, Goldsmith was by far the most formidable. He was a much more popular author than Johnson. He was styled, by Johnson himself, ‘a very great man.’ But there was no room in Boswell’s book for two very great men. So, in perfect good faith, and almost unconsciously, Boswell set himself to belittle Goldsmith. He introduces him as ‘one of the brightest ornaments of the Johnsonian school,’ and thereafter consistently exhibits him as a humble disciple who was sometimes vain and foolish enough to enter into competition with his great master. For this view of Goldsmith Boswell more than once attempted to get Johnson’s support. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘he is much indebted to you for his getting so high in the publick estimation.’ Johnson’s fairness of mind was proof against these temptations. ‘Why, Sir,’ he replied, ‘he has perhaps got sooner to it by his intimacy with me.’

Partly, no doubt, Boswell was jealous of the older friend. Partly he was incapable of understanding the Irish humour, and thought it mere folly. The instances which he gives to illustrate Goldsmith’s ridiculous envy are a strange proof of his own misapprehensions. Once when Goldsmith was travelling abroad in the company of the beautiful Miss Hornecks, and they all stood together in the window of their hotel at Lisle, to see the soldiers in the square, the beauty of the sisters excited marked admiration from below, and Goldsmith (who was not a handsome man), turning on his heel, remarked, with an air of pique, that he, too, had his admirers