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When some one asked him for what he should marry, he replied, first, for virtue; secondly, for wit; thirdly, for beauty; and fourthly, for money'.

He thought worse of the vices of retirement than of those of society 2.

He attended Mr. Thrale in his last moments, and stayed in the room praying, as is imagined, till he had drawn his last breath. His servants, said he, would have waited upon him in this awful period, and why not his friend3?

He was extremely fond of reading the lives of great and learned persons*. Two or three years before he died, he applied to a friend of his to give him a list of those in the French language that were well written and genuine. He said, that Bolingbroke had declared he could not read Middleton's life of Cicero 5.

He was a great enemy to the present fashionable way of supposing worthless and infamous persons mad.

He was not apt to judge ill of persons without good reasons;

Printer or Stationer to the East India Company) in the early part of his life was seized with the cacoethes scribendi, and having finished a Pamphlet wished much to have Mr. Johnson's opinion of it, before he offered it to the Publick. So without any previous knowledge or introduction, he called on Johnson, and humbly requested him to peruse the Manuscript of his first production; which was with great good nature immediately acquiesced in: when he had finished it he said to Mr. Townshend, Pray, Sir, are you of any profession?" "A Printer, at your service." "Then, Sir, I would recommend you to print any work rather than your own; it will turn out more to your advantage if you get paid for it, and if it be worth printing, infinitely more to your credit." This interview Townshend spoke of in his latter days with grateful remem

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brance; a different reception, he said, would have flattered his vanity and allured him to poverty and contempt.'

I

Life, ii. 128; iv. 131.

2 Ib. v. 62.

3 Ib. iv. 84; ante, i. 96.

4 Ib. i. 425; v. 79.

5 Johnson would not read Bolingbroke's works-at all events his Philosophical works. Ib. i. 330.

'My Lord Bolingbroke has lost his wife.... Dr. Middleton told me a compliment she made him two years ago which I thought pretty. She said she was persuaded that he was a very great writer, for she understood his works better than any other English book, and that she had observed that the best writers were always the most intelligible.' [She was a Frenchwoman.] Walpole's Letters, ii. 202.

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an old friend of his used to say, that in general he thought too well of mankind '.

One day, on seeing an old terrier lie asleep by the fire-side at Streatham, he said, Presto, you are, if possible, a more lazy dog than I am 2.

Being told that Churchill had abused him under the character of Pomposo, in his Ghost,—I always thought, said he, he was a shallow fellow and I think so still 3.

When some one asked him how he felt at the indifferent reception of his tragedy at Drury-lane ;-Like the Monument, said he, and as unshaken as that fabrick.

Being asked by Dr. Lawrence what he thought the best system of education, he replied,-School in school-hours, and home-instruction in the intervals 5.

I would never, said he, desire a young man to neglect his business for the purpose of pursuing his studies, because it is unreasonable; I would only desire him to read at those hours when he would otherwise be unemployed. I will not promise that he will be a Bentley; but if he be a lad of any parts, he will certainly make a sensible man".

The picture of him by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which was painted for Mr. Beauclerk, and is now Mr. Langton's, and scraped in

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mezzotinto by Doughty, is extremely like him; there is in it that appearance of a labouring working mind, of an indolent reposing body, which he had to a very great degree. Beauclerk wrote under his picture,

'ingenium ingens

Inculto habet hoc sub corpore1?

Indeed, the common operations of dressing, shaving, &c., were a toil to him; he held the care of the body very cheap. He used to say, that a man who rode out for an appetite consulted but little the dignity of human nature.

He was much pleased with an Italian improvvisatore, whom he saw at Streatham, and with whom he talked much in Latin. He told him, if he had not been a witness to his faculty himself, he should not have thought it possible. He said, Isaac Hawkins Browne had endeavoured at it in English, but could not get beyond thirty verses.

When a Scotsman was one day talking to him of the great writers of that country that were then existing, he said: 'We have taught that nation to write, and do they pretend to be our teachers? let me hear no more of the tinsel of Robertson, and the foppery of Dalrymple". He said, Hume has taken his style from Voltaire. He would never hear Hume mentioned with any temper:-'A man,' said he, 'who endeavoured to persuade his friend who had the stone to shoot himself".'

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Upon hearing a lady of his acquaintance commended for her learning, he said :-'A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek. My old friend, Mrs. Carter 1, said he, could make a pudding, as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.' He thought she was too reserved in conversation upon subjects she was so eminently able to converse upon, which was occasioned by her modesty and fear of giving offence 2.

Being asked whether he had read Mrs. Macaulay's second volume of the History of England ;-'No, Sir,' says he, 'nor her

'a work was published in London
called Essays on Suicide and the
Immortality of the Soul, ascribed to
the late David Hume, Esq. That
Hume wrote these Essays, and in-
tended to publish them, is an inci-
Ident in his life which ought not to
be passed over; but it is also part
of his history that he repented of
the act at the last available mo-
ment, and suppressed the publication.'
J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 13. See
also Letters of Hume to Strahan,
pp. 230-3, 355, 362. The work was
published not seven years, but one
year after his death. In the Essay
on Suicide he says:-'Let us here
endeavour to restore men to their
native liberty by examining all the
common arguments against suicide,
and shewing that that action may
be free from every imputation
of guilt or blame, according to the
sentiments of all the ancient phi-
losophers.' Ed. 1777, p. 5.
p. 15 he says:-'When the horror of
pain prevails over the love of life;
when a voluntary action anticipates
the effects of blind causes, 'tis only
in consequence of those powers and
principles which he [the supreme
creator] has implanted in his
creatures.'

On

I cannot find any account of his

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'It is, indeed, an unhappy circumstance in a family, where the wife has more knowledge than the husband; but it is better it should be so than that there should be no knowledge in the whole house.' Addison's Works, ed. 1864, iv. 319. 'If I had a daughter,' wrote Lord Chesterfield, 'I would give her as much learning as a boy.' Chesterfield's Letters to A. C. Stanhope, ed. 1817, p. 151.

2 She is, no doubt, the Lady meant in the following passage in Sir Charles Grandison (ed. 1754, i. 63), where Miss Byron says:-'Who, I, a woman know anything of Latin and Greek! I know but one Lady who is mistress of both; and she finds herself so much an owl among the birds, that she wants of all things to be thought to have unlearned them.'

first neither '.' He would not be introduced to the Abbé Raynal, when he was in England 2.

He said, that when he first conversed with Mr. Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, he was very much inclined to believe he had been there; but that he had afterwards altered his opinion 3. He was much pleased with Dr. Jortin's Sermons, the language of which he thought very elegant; but thought his life of Erasmus a dull book.

He was very well acquainted with Psalmanaazar, the pretended Formosan, and said, he had never seen the close of the life of any one that he wished so much his own to resemble, as that of him, for its purity and devotion. He told many anecdotes of him; and said he was supposed by his accent to have been a Gascon. He said, that Psalmanaazar spoke English with the city accent, and coarsely enough. He for some years spent his evenings at a publick house near Old-Street, where many persons went to talk with him; Johnson was asked whether he ever contradicted Psalmanaazar;-'I should as soon,' said he, 'have thought of contradicting a bishop';' so high did he hold

Of her he said:-'She is better employed at her toilet, than using her pen. It is better she should be reddening her own cheeks, than blackening other people's characters.' Life, iii. 46. In the Sale Catalogue of his Library, Lot 68 is Macaulay's History of England, 2 v. 1763-5.'

2 Mrs. Chapone wrote to Mrs. Carter on June 15, 1777 :-'I suppose you have heard a great deal of the Abbé Raynal, who is in London. I fancy you would have served him as Dr. Johnson did, to whom when Mrs. Vesey introduced him, he turned from him, and said he had read his book, and would have nothing to say to him.' Mrs. Chapone's Posthumous Works, i. 172. His book was burnt by the common hangman in Paris. Carlyle's French Revolution, ed. 1857, i. 45. Carlyle wrote to his future wife in 1824:-'If you are for fiery

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