He was no great friend to puns, though he once by accident made a singular one. A person who affected to live after the Greek manner, and to anoint himself with oil, was one day mentioned before him. Johnson, in the course of conversation on the singularity of his practice, gave him the denomination of,

This man of Greece, or grease, as you please to take it1.

Of a member of parliament, who, after having harangued for some hours in the house of commons, came into a company where Johnson was, and endeavoured to talk him down, he said, This man has a pulse in his tongue.

He was not displeased with a kind of pun made by a person, who (after having been tired to death by two ladies who talked

'Obscenity and impiety (he said) have always been repressed in my company.' Life, iv. 295. See also ib. iii. 189.

Susan Burney, sending her sister a report of a conversation at Streatham when Johnson was present, reports Mrs. Thrale as crying out:'Good G-d! why somebody else mentioned that book to me.' Mrs. Raine Ellis, who has edited Fanny Burney's Early Diary with great skill, says in a footnote:-'The careless old ejaculations have, in almost every case, been modified, or effaced in the manuscripts of the diaries, old and new; in many cases by Mme. D'Arblay herself, in more by her niece, who was the editor of her later diaries. These almost unmeaning expletives seem to have passed unrebuked by Dr. Johnson in the case of Mrs. Thrale, although he I would not suffer Boswell to write

"by my soul.” ['My illustrious friend said, "It is very well, Sir; but

you should not swear.' " Life, ii.

III.] His ear had become used to them, or she was incorrigible.' Early Diary of F. Burney, ii. 234.

son, says: It was the first time that I knew him stoop to such sport.' Ib. iii. 325. In his Dictionary, he defines punster as a low wit, who endeavours at reputation by double meaning.

Dryden, after quoting Horace's pun on 'Mr. King' (Satires, i. 7. 35), continues: But it may be puns were then in fashion, as they were wit in the sermons of the last age and in the Court of King Charles II.' Scott's Dryden's Works, xiii. 97.

'A great Critic formerly held these clenches in such abhorrence that he declared "he that would pun would pick a pocket." Yet Mr. Dennis's works afford us notable examples in this kind.' The Dunciad, 2nd ed. i. 61, n. Shaftesbury wrote in 1714:'All Humour had something of the Quibble. The very Language of the Court was Punning. But 'tis now banish'd the Town and all Good Company. There are only some few Footsteps of it in the Country; and it seems at last confin'd to the Nurserys of Youth, as the chief Entertainment of Pedants and their Pupils.' Characteristicks, ed. 1714, i. 64.

'I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.' Lamb's Letters, ed. 1888, ii. 148.

of

of the antiquity and illustriousness of their families, himself being quite a new man) cried out, with the ghost in Hamlet,

'This eternal blazon

Must not be to ears of flesh and blood '.'

One who had long known Johnson, said of him, In general you may tell what the man to whom you are speaking will say next: this you can never do of Johnson: his images, his allusions, his great powers of ridicule throw the appearance of novelty upon the most common conversation 2.

He was extremely fond of Dr. Hammond's Works3, and sometimes gave them as a present to young men going into orders: he also bought them for the library at Streatham.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock, said Johnson, is a scoundrel:-having nothing in particular to do himself, and having none of his time appropriated, he was a troublesome guest to persons who had much to do *.

He rose as unwillingly as he went to bed 5.

He said, he was always hurt when he found himself ignorant of any thing".

He was extremely accurate in his computation of time. He could tell how many heroick Latin verses could be repeated in such a given portion of it; and was anxious that his friends should take pains to form in their minds some measure for estimating the lapse of it.

Of authors he used to say, that as they think themselves wiser or wittier than the rest of the world, the world, after all, must be the judge of their pretensions to superiority over them3.

Complainers, said he, are always loud and clamorous 1.

He thought highly of Mandeville's Treatise on the Hypochrondriacal Disease 2.

He would not allow the verb derange, a word at present much in use, to be an English word. Sir, said a gentleman who had some pretensions to literature, I have seen it in a book. Not in a bound book, said Johnson; disarrange is the word we ought to use instead of it 3.

He thought very favourably of the profession of the law, and said, that the sages thereof, for a long series backward, had been friends to religion. Fortescue says, that their afternoon's employment was the study of the Scriptures 5.

2 Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, vulgarly called Hypo in Men, and Vapours in Women, 1711.

Of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees he said I read Mandeville forty, or I believe, fifty years ago. He did not puzzle me; he opened my views into life very much.' Life, iii. 292. See also Hawkins's Johnson, p. 263.

3 Neither derange nor disarrange is in Johnson's Dictionary. Of derange he might have said that it was word " lately innovated from France without necessity.' Life,

a

6

5 Quare Justiciarii, postquam se refecerint, totum Diei residuum pertranseunt studendo in Legibus, sacram legendo Scripturam, et aliter ad eorum Libitum contemplando, ut Vita ipsorum plus contemplativa videatur quam activa. Sicque quietam illi Vitam agunt ab omni Sollicitudine et Mundi Turbinibus semotam.' Fortescue, De Laudibus, cap. li.

'When a lawyer, a warm partisan of Lord Chancellor Eldon, called him one of the pillars of the Church; "No," said another lawyer," he may be one of its buttresses; but certainly not one of its pillars, for he is never found within it."" Twiss's Life of Eldon, ed. 1844, iii. 488.

EXTRACTS

FROM JAMES BOSWELL'S LETTERS

TO EDMOND MALONE1

DEC. 4. 1790. Let me begin with myself. On the day after your departure, that most friendly fellow Courtenay2 (begging the pardon of an M.P. for so free an epithet) called on me, and took my word and honour that, till the 1st of March, my allowance of wine per diem should not exceed four good glasses at dinner, and a pint after it3: and this I have kept, though I have dined with Jack Wilkes; at the London Tavern, after the launch of an Indiaman; with dear Edwards; Dilly 5; at home with Courtenay; Dr. Barrow; at the mess of the Cold

Published in Croker's Boswell, x. 209, from the MSS. in Mr. Upcott's collection.

2 John Courtenay. In the new Parliament which met on Nov. 25 he sat for Tamworth. For his Moral and Literary Character of Dr. Johnson see Life, i. 222.

3 Under the solemn yew,' fifteen years earlier, he had promised his friend Temple not to exceed a bottle of old Hock a day. The following year he wrote:-' General Paoli has taken my word of honour that I shall not taste fermented liquor for a year.' Life, ii. 436, n. I.

Boswell complacently recorded in his Journal :-'When Wilkes and I sat together, each glass of wine produced a flash of wit, like gunpowder thrown into the fire. Puff! puff!' Rogers's Boswelliana, p. 322.

5 Charles Dilly, Boswell's publisher, at whose house 'Johnson owned that he always found a good dinner.' Life, iii. 285.

6 Boswell wrote to Temple on Nov. 28, 1789:-'My second son is an extraordinary boy; he is much of his father (vanity of vanities).

He is still in the house with me; indeed he is quite my companion, though only eleven in September. He goes in the day to the academy in Soho Square, kept by the Rev. Dr. Barrow, formerly of Queen's, Oxford, a coarse north-countryman, but a very good scholar.' Letters of Boswell, p. 315.

Barrow wrote to John James on Jan. 26, 1786:-The reviews and papers will tell you better than I can, that the booksellers are engaged in a contest who shall publish the first

stream;

stream; at the Club; at Warren Hastings's'; at Hawkins the Cornish member's3; and at home with a colonel of the guards, &c. This regulation I assure you is of essential advantage in many respects. The Magnum Opus advances. I have revised p. 216. The additions which I have received are a Spanish quotation from Mr. Cambridge 5; an account of Johnson at. Warley Camp from Mr. Langton; and Johnson's letters to Mr. Hastings-three in all-one of them long and admirable; but what sets the diamonds in pure gold of Ophir is a letter from Mr. Hastings to me, illustrating them and their writer. I had this day the honour of a long visit from the late governor-general of India. There is to be no more impeachment. But you will see his character nobly vindicated". Depend upon this.

and best edition of Johnson's Dictionary, and that his friends are running a race who shall be foremost in giving, or rather selling, to the world some scrap or fragment of our literary Leviathan-an anecdote, a letter, or a character, a sermon, a prayer, or a bon-mot.' Letters of Radcliffe and James, p. 266. 'I do not quite affect John's friend Barrow,' wrote J. Boucher; 'he seems too rough and rugged a northern. He would overawe me.' Ib. p. 267.

I The Coldstream Guards. Boswell nearly thirty years earlier had described his 'fondness for the Guards.' Life, i. 400.

2 For Hastings's letter to Boswell dated the 2nd of this month see ib. iv. 66.

3 Sir Christopher Hawkins, member for Michell. W. P. Courtney's Parl. Repres. of Cornwall, p. 319. 4 Of the second volume. 5 Life, iii. 251. In another passage (ib. iv. 195) Boswell records a conversation between Cambridge and Johnson about a Spanish translation of Sallust. Dr. Franklin wrote to W. Strahan from Passy, on Dec. 4,

8 Boswell's hope was from the new Parliament. The friends of Hastings entertained a hope that the new House of Commons might not be disposed to go on with the impeachment.' Macaulay's Essays, ed. 1843, iii. 455. Their hope was disappointed. Dr. Burney wrote to his daughter on May 7, 1795:-' And so dear Mr. Hastings is honourably acquitted; and I visited him the next morning, and we cordially shook hands.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, vi. 36.

9 In the Life of Johnson, that is to say. See Life, iv. 66.

And