Aetat. 56.] Boswell in Corsica. 3 the capital of Corsica, and is full of generous enthusiasm. After giving a sketch of what I had seen and heard in that island, it proceeded thus: 'I dare to call this a spirited tour. I dare to challenge your approbation.' This letter produced the following answer, which I found on my arrival at Paris. A Mr. Mr. BoSWELL, chez Mr. WATERS, Banquier, à Paris. DEAR SIR, 'Apologies are seldom of any use. We will delay till your arrival the reasons, good or bad, which have made me such a sparing and ungrateful correspondent. Be assured, for the present, that nothing has lessened either the esteem or love with which I dismissed you at Harwich. Both have been increased by all that I have been told of you by yourself or others; and when you return, you will return to an unaltered, and, I hope, unalterable friend. 'All that you have to fear from me is the vexation of disappointing No man loves to frustrate expectations which have been formed in his favour; and the pleasure which I promise myself from your me. I'On one of the days that my ague disturbed me least, I walked from the convent to Corte, purposely to write a letter to Mr. Samuel Johnson. I told my revered friend, that from a kind of superstition agreeable in a certain degree to him as well as to myself, I had, during my travels, written to him from Loca Solennia, places in some measure sacred. That, as I had written to him from the tomb of Melancthon (see post, June 28, 1777), sacred to learning and piety, I now wrote to him from the palace of Pascal Paoli, sacred to wisdom and liberty.' Boswell's Tour to Corsica, p. 218. How delighted would Boswell have been had he lived to see the way in which he is spoken of by the biographer of Paoli: 'En traversant la Méditerranée sur de frêles navires pour venir s'asseoir au foyer de la nationalité Corse, des hommes graves tels que Boswel et Volney obéissaient sans doute à un sentiment bien plus élevé qu'au B besoin vulgaire d'une puérile curiosité.' Histoire de Pascal Paoli, par A. Arrighi, i. 231. By every Corsican of any education the name of Boswell is known and honoured. One of them told me that it was in Boswell's pages that Paoli still lived for them. He informed me also of a family which still preserved by tradition the remembrance of Boswell's visit to their ancestral home. 2 The twelve following lines of this letter were published by Boswell in his Corsica (p. 219) without Johnson's leave. (See post, March 23, 1768.) Temple, to whom the book had been shewn before publication, had, it should seem, advised Boswell to omit this extract. Boswell replied :— 'Your remarks are of great service to me... but I must have my great preceptor, Mr. Johnson, introduced.' Letters of Boswell, p. 122. In writing to excuse himself to Johnson (post, April 26, 1768), he says, 'the temptation to publishing it was so strong.' journals 2 4 Boswell's return to London. [A.D. 1766. journals and remarks is so great, that perhaps no degree of attention or discernment will be sufficient to afford it. 'Come home, however, and take your chance. I long to see you, and to hear you; and hope that we shall not be so long separated again. Come home, and expect such a welcome as is due to him whom a wise and noble curiosity has led, where perhaps no native of this country ever was before 1. 'I have no news to tell you that can deserve your notice; nor would I willingly lessen the pleasure that any novelty may give you at your return. I am afraid we shall find it difficult to keep among us a mind which has been so long feasted with variety. But let us try what esteem and kindness can effect. 'As your father's liberality has indulged you with so long a ramble, I doubt not but you will think his sickness, or even his desire to see you, a sufficient reason for hastening your return. The longer we live, and the more we think, the higher value we learn to put on the friendship and tenderness of parents and of friends. Parents we can have but once; and he promises himself too much, who enters life with the expectation of finding many friends. Upon some motive, I hope, that you will be here soon; and am willing to think that it will be an inducement to your return, that it is sincerely desired by, dear Sir, "Your affectionate humble servant, 'Johnson's Court, Fleet-street, 'SAM. JOHNSON.' January 14, 1766.' I returned to London in February, and found Dr. Johnson in 'Tell your Court,' said Paoli to Boswell, 'what you have seen here. They will be curious to ask you. A man come from Corsica will be like a man come from the Antipodes.' Boswell's Corsica, p. 188. He was not indeed the first 'native of this country' to go there. He found in Bastia 'an English woman of Penrith, in Cumberland. When the Highlanders marched through that country in the year 1745, she had married a soldier of the French picquets in the very midst of all the confusion and danger, and when she could hardly understand one word he said.' Ib., p. 226. Boswell nowhere quotes Mrs. Barbauld's fine lines on Corsica. Perhaps he was 'Such were the working thoughts And views beyond the narrow By trivial fancy trod, he turned his course From polished Gallia's soft delicious vales,' &c. Mrs. Barbauld's Poems, i. 2. a Aetat. 57.] Johnson in Johnson's Court. 5 a good house in Johnson's Court, Fleet-street', in which he had accommodated Miss Williams with an apartment on the ground floor, while Mr. Levett occupied his post in the garret: his faithful Francis was still attending upon him. He received me with much kindness. The fragments of our first conversation, which I have preserved, are these: I told him that Voltaire, in a conversation with me, had distinguished Pope and Dryden thus: Pope drives a handsome chariot, with a couple of neat trim nags; Dryden a coach, and six stately horses.' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, the truth is, they both drive coaches and six; but Dryden's horses are either galloping or stumbling: Pope's go at a steady even trot?' He said of Goldsmith's Traveller, which had been published in my absence, 'There has not been so fine a poem since Pope's time.' And here it is proper to settle, with authentick precision, what has long floated in publick report, as to Johnson's being himself the authour of a considerable part of that poem. Much, no doubt, Murphy, in the Monthly Review, lxxvi. 376, thus describes Johnson's life in Johnson's Court after he had received his pension. 'His friend Levett, his physician in ordinary, paid his daily visits with assiduity; attended at all hours, made tea all the morning, talked what he had to say, and did not expect an answer; or, if occasion required it, was mute, officious, and ever complying. . . . There Johnson sat every morning, receiving visits, hearing the topics of the day, and indolently trifling away the time. Chymistry afforded some amusement.' Hawkins (Life, p. 452), says :-'An upper room, which had the advantages of a good light and free air, he fitted up for a study. A silver standish and some useful plate, which he had been prevailed on to accept as pledges of kindness from some who most esteemed him, together with furniture that would not have disgraced a better dwelling, banished those appearances of squalid indigence which, in his less happy days, disgusted those who came to see him.' Some of the plate Johnson had bought. See post, April 15, 1781. 2 It is remarkable, that Mr. Gray has employed somewhat the same image to characterise Dryden. He, indeed, furnishes his car with but two horses, but they are of 'ethereal race :' Behold where Dryden's less pre sumptuous car, Wide o'er the fields of glory bear and long resounding pace.' both 6 Johnson's lines in THE TRAVELLER. [A.D. 1766. both of the sentiments and expression, were derived from conversation with him; and it was certainly submitted to his friendly revision: but in the year 1783, he, at my request, marked with a pencil the lines which he had furnished, which are only line 420th, 'To stop too fearful, and too faint to go;' and the concluding ten lines, except the last couplet but one, which I distinguish by the Italick character: 'How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which kings or laws1 can cause or cure. Our own felicity we make or find2; With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel, Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel, To men remote from power, but rarely known, He added, 'These are all of which I can be sure 3. They bear a small proportion to the whole, which consists of four hundred and thirty-eight verses. Goldsmith, in the couplet which he inserted, mentions Luke as a person well known, and superficial readers have passed it over quite smoothly; while those of more * In the original laws or kings. 2 The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' Paradise Lost, i. 254. 'Caelum, non animum, mutant qui trans mare currunt.' Horace, Epis. i. 11. 27. See also ante, i. 381. note 2. 3 'I once inadvertently put him,' wrote Reynolds, 'in a situation from which none but a man of perfect integrity could extricate himself. I pointed at some lines in The Traveller which I told him I was sure he wrote. He hesitated a little; during this hesitation I recollected myself, that, as I knew he would not lie, I put him in a cleft-stick, and should have had but my due if he had given me a attention Aetat. 57.] Teaching by lectures. 7 attention have been as much perplexed by Luke, as by Lydiat1, in The Vanity of Human Wishes. The truth is, that Goldsmith himself was in a mistake. In the Respublica Hungarica, there is an account of a desperate rebellion in the year 1514, headed by two brothers, of the name of Zeck, George and Luke. When it was quelled, George, not Luke, was punished by his head being encircled with a red-hot iron crown: 'corona candescente ferred coronatur? The same severity of torture was exercised on the Earl of Athol, one of the murderers of King James I. of Scotland. Dr. Johnson at the same time favoured me by marking the lines which he furnished to Goldsmith's Deserted Village, which are only the last four: 'That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, Talking of education, 'People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments 2 See ante, i. 194, note. Respublica et Status Regni Hungariae. Ex Officina Elzeviriana, 1634, p. 136. This work belongs to the series of Republics mentioned by Johnson, post, under April 29, 1776. 3" Luke" had been taken simply for the euphony of the line. He was one of two brothers, Dosa.... The origin of the mistake [of Zeck for Dosa] is curious. The two brothers belonged to one of the native races of Transylvania called Szeklers or Zecklers, which descriptive addition follows their names in the German biographical authorities; and this, through abridgment and misapprehension, in subsequent books came at last to be substituted for the family name.' Forster's Goldsmith, i. 370. The iron crown was not the worst of the tortures inflicted. See post, April 15, 1781. In 1748 Johnson had written (Works, v. 231): 'At a time when so many schemes of education have been projected,... so many schools opened for general knowledge, and so many lectures in particular sciences attended.' Goldsmith, in his Life of Nash (published in 1762), describes the lectures at Bath 'on the arts and sciences, which are frequently taught there in a pretty, superficial manner, so as not to tease the understanding, while they afford the imagination some amusement.' Cunningham's Goldsmith's Works, iv. 59. are |