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Aetat. 49.]

Theobald and Warburton.

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history, and shewed him some volumes of his Shakspeare already printed, to prove that he was in earnest. Upon Mr. Burney's opening the first volume, at the Merchant of Venice, he observed to him, that he seemed to be more severe on Warburton than Theobald. "O poor Tib.! (said Johnson) he was ready knocked down to my hands; Warburton stands between me and him." "But, Sir, (said Mr. Burney,) you'll have Warburton upon your bones, won't you?" "No, Sir; he'll not come out he'll only growl in his den." "But you think, Sir, that Warburton is a superiour critick to Theobald?” "O, Sir, he'd make two-and-fifty Theobalds, cut into slices1! The worst of Warburton is, that he has a rage for saying something, when there's nothing to be said." Mr. Burney then asked him whether he had seen the letter which Warburton had written in answer to a pamphlet addressed "To the most impudent Man alive?." He answered in the negative. Mr. Burney told him it was supposed to be written by Mallet. The controversy now raged between the friends of Pope and Bolingbroke; and Warburton and Mallet were the leaders of the several parties3.

some support, taking no notice of its imperfection to his visitor. It was remarkable in Johnson, that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence.' Croker's Boswell, p. 832. There can be little question that she is describing the same room-a room in a house in which Miss Williams was lodged, and most likely Mr. Levet, and in which Mr. Burney dined; and in which certainly there must have been chairs. Yet Mr. Carlyle, misled by her account, says :-' In his apartments, at one time, there were unfortunately no chairs.' Carlyle's Miscellanies, ed. 1872, iv. 127.

In his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 272) Johnson calls Theobald 'a man of heavy diligence, with very slender powers.' In the Preface to Shakspeare he admits that 'what little he did was commonly right.' Ib. v. 137. The Editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare on the other hand say: 'Theobald, as an Editor, is incomparably superior to his predecessors, and to his immediate successor Warburton, although the latter

had the advantage of working on his materials. Many most brilliant emendations are due to him.' On Johnson's statement that 'Warburton would make two-and-fifty Theobalds, cut into slices,' they write :-'From this judgment, whether they be compared as critics or editors, we emphatically dissent.' Cambridge Shakespeare, i., xxxi., xxxiv., note. Among Theobald's 'brilliant emendations' are 'a' babbled of green fields' (Henry V, ii. 3), and 'lackeying the varying tide.' (Antony and Cleopatra, i. 4).

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A familiar epistle [by Lord Bolingbroke] to the most impudent man living, 1749. Brit. Mus. Catal.

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THE IDLER.

[A.D. 1758. Mr. Burney asked him then if he had seen Warburton's book against Bolingbroke's Philosophy1? "No, Sir, I have never read Bolingbroke's impiety, and therefore am not interested about its confutation."'

On the fifteenth of April he began a new periodical paper, entitled The Idler, which came out every Saturday in a weekly news-paper, called The Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette, published by Newbery3. These essays were continued till April 5, 1760. Of one hundred and three, their total number, twelve were contributed by his friends; of which, Numbers 33, 93, and 96, were written by Mr. Thomas Warton; No. 67 by Mr. Langton; and Nos. 76, 79, and 82, by Sir Joshua Reynolds; the concluding words of No. 82, and pollute his canvas with deformity,' being added by Johnson, as Sir Joshua informed me1.

The Idler is evidently the work of the same mind which produced The Rambler, but has less body and more spirit. It

broke, in a fit of useless fury, resolved to blast his memory, and employed Mallet (1749) as the executioner of his vengeance. Mallet had not virtue, or had not spirit, to refuse the office; and was rewarded not long after with the legacy of Lord Bolingbroke's works.' Johnson's Works, viii. 467. See ante, p. 268, and Walpole's Letters, ii. 159.

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A View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy in Four Letters to a Friend, 1754-5.

A paper under this name had been started seven years earlier. See Carter and Talbot Corres., ii. 33.

3 In the two years in which Johnson wrote for this paper it saw many changes. The first Idler appeared in No. 2 of the Universal Chronicle or Weekly Gazette, which was published not by Newbery, but by J. Payne. On April 29, this paper took the title of Payne's Universal Chronicle, etc. On Jan. 6, 1759, it resumed the old title and was published by R. Stevens. On Jan. 5, 1760, the title was changed to The Universal Chronicle and Westminster Journal, and it was published

by W. Faden and R. Stevens. On March 15, 1760, it was published by R. Stevens alone. The paper con sisted of eight pages. The Idler, which varied in length, came first, and was printed in larger characters, much like a leading article. The changes in title and ownership seem to show that in spite of Johnson's contributions it was not a successful publi cation.

Those papers may be considered as a kind of syllabus of all Reynolds's future discourses, and certainly occasioned him some thinking in their composition. I have heard him say, that Johnson required them from him on a sudden emergency, and on that account, he sat up the whole night to complete them in time; and by it he was so much disordered, that it produced a vertigo in his head.' Northcote's Reynolds, i. 89. Reynolds must have spoken of only one paper; as the three, appearing as they did on Sept. 29, Oct. 20, and Nov. 10, could not have been required at one time.

has

Aetat. 49.]

THE IDLER.

331 has more variety of real life, and greater facility of language. He describes the miseries of idleness, with the lively sensations of one who has felt them'; and in his private memorandums while engaged in it, we find 'This year I hope to learn diligence? Many of these excellent essays were written as hastily as an ordinary letter. Mr. Langton remembers Johnson, when on a visit at Oxford3, asking him one evening how long it was till the post went out; and on being told about half an hour, he exclaimed, then we shall do very well.' He upon this instantly sat down and finished an Idler, which it was necessary should be in London the next day. Mr. Langton having signified a wish to read it, 'Sir, (said he) you shall not do more than I have done myself.' He then folded it up and sent it off.

Yet there are in The Idler several papers which shew as much profundity of thought, and labour of language, as any of this great man's writings. No. 14, 'Robbery of Time;' No. 24, 'Thinking;' No. 41, 'Death of a Friend';' No. 43, 'Flight of Time;' No. 51, 'Domestick greatness unattainable;' No. 52, 'Self-denial;' No. 58, 'Actual, how short of fancied, excellence";' No. 89, Physical evil moral good";' and his concluding paper on 'The horrour of the last';' will prove this assertion. I know

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of No. 58 is, 'Expectations of pleasure frustrated.' In the original edition of The Idler no titles are given. In this paper he shews that nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.'

In this paper he begins by considering, 'why the only thinking being of this globe is doomed to think merely to be wretched, and to pass his time from youth to age in fearing or in suffering calamities.' He ends by asserting that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greater part.'

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Influence of the weather.

[A.D. 1758.

not why a motto, the usual trapping of periodical papers, is prefixed to very few of the Idlers, as I have heard Johnson commend the custom: and he never could be at a loss for one, his memory being stored with innumerable passages of the classicks'. In this series of essays he exhibits admirable instances of grave humour, of which he had an uncommon share. Nor on some occasions has he repressed that power of sophistry which he possessed in so eminent a degree. In No. 11, he treats with the utmost contempt the opinion that our mental faculties depend, in some degree, upon the weather; an opinion, which they who have never experienced its truth are not to be envied, and of which he himself could not but be sensible, as the effects of weather upon him were very visible. Yet thus he declaims :

'Surely, nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason, than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind for the only blessings which nature has put into our power, tranquillity and benevolence. This distinction of seasons is produced only by imagination operating on luxury. To temperance, every day is bright; and every hour is propitious to diligence. He that shall resolutely excite his faculties, or exert his virtues, will soon make himself superiour to the seasons; and may set at defiance the morning mist and the evening damp, the blasts of the east, and the clouds of the south'.'

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'I asked him one day, why the Idlers were published without mottoes. He replied, that it was forborne the better to conceal himself, and escape discovery. "But let us think of some now," said he, "for the next edition. We can fit the two volumes in two hours, can't we?" Accordingly he recollected, and I wrote down these following [nine mottoes], till some friend coming in, in about five minutes, put an end to our further progress on the subject.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 388.

See post, July 14 and 26, 1763, April 14, 1775, and Aug. 2, 1784, note, for instances in which Johnson ridicules the notion that weather and seasons have any necessary effect on man; also April 17, 1778. In the Life of Milton (Works, vii. 102), he

writes:This dependence of the soul upon the seasons, those temporary and periodical ebbs and flows of intellect, may, I suppose, justly be derided as the fumes of vain imagination. Sapiens dominabitur astris. The author that thinks himself weather-bound will find, with a little help from hellebore, that he is only idle or exhausted. But while this notion has possession of the head, it produces the inability which it supposes. Our powers owe much of their energy to our hopes; possunt quia posse videntur? Boswell records, in his Hebrides (Aug. 16, 1773), that when somebody talked of happy moments for composition,' Johnson said:-'Nay, a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.' Reynolds, who

Alas!

Aetat. 49.]

The attendants on a Court.

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Alas! it is too certain, that where the frame has delicate fibres, and there is a fine sensibility, such influences of the air are irresistible. He might as well have bid defiance to the ague, the palsy, and all other bodily disorders. Such boasting of the mind is false elevation.

'I think the Romans call it Stoicism'.'

But in this number of his Idler his spirits seem to run riot; for in the wantonness of his disquisition he forgets, for a moment, even the reverence for that which he held in high respect; and describes the attendant on a Court, as one 'whose business is to watch the looks of a being, weak and foolish as himself3.

avowed how much he had learnt from Johnson (ante, p. 245), says much the same in his Seventh Discourse:

But when, in plain prose, we gravely talk of courting the Muse in shady bowers; waiting the call and inspiration of Genius... of attending to times and seasons when the imagination shoots with the greatest vigour, whether at the summer solstice or the vernal equinox. . . when we talk such language or entertain such sentiments as these, we generally rest contented with mere words, or at best entertain notions not only groundless but pernicious.' Reynolds's Works, i. 150. On the other hand, in 1773 Johnson recorded :— 'Between Easter and Whitsuntide, having always considered that time as propitious to study, I attempted to learn the Low-Dutch language.' Post, under May 9, 1773. In The Rambler, No. 80, he says:-'To the men of study and imagination the winter is generally the chief time of labour. Gloom and silence produce composure of mind and concentration of ideas.' In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, written in 1775, he says::-' Most men have their bright and their cloudy days, at least they have days when they put their powers into act, and days when they suffer them to repose.' Piozzi Letters, i. 265. In

1781 he wrote:-'I thought myself above assistance or obstruction from the seasons; but find the autumnal blast sharp and nipping, and the fading world an uncomfortable prospect.' Ib. ii. 220. Again, in the last year of his life he wrote :-'The weather, you know, has not been balmy. I am now reduced to think, and am at least content to talk, of the weather. Pride must have a fall.' Póst, Aug. 2, 1784.

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3

Addison's Cato, act i. sc. 4.

Johnson, reviewing the Duchess of Marlborough's attack on Queen Mary, says (Works, vi. 8):— This is a character so different from all those that have been hitherto given of this celebrated princess, that the reader stands in suspense, till he considers that... it has hitherto had this great advantage, that it has only been compared with those of kings.' Johnson had explained how it comes to pass that Englishmen talk so commonly of the weather. He continues:-'Such is the reason of our practice; and who shall treat it with contempt? Surely not the attendant on a court, whose business is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself, and whose vanity is to recount the names of men, who might drop into nothing, and leave no vacuity. . . . The

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