Aetat. 54.]

Convocation.

537

On Wednesday, August 3, we had our last social evening at the Turk's Head coffee-house, before my setting out for foreign parts. I had the misfortune, before we parted, to irritate him unintentionally. I mentioned to him how common it was in the world to tell absurd stories of him, and to ascribe to him very strange sayings. JOHNSON. 'What do they make me say, Sir?' BOSWELL. 'Why, Sir, as an instance very strange indeed, (laughing heartily as I spoke,) David Hume told me, you said that you would stand before a battery of cannon, to restore the Convocation to its full powers.' Little did I apprehend that he had actually said this but I was soon convinced of my errour; for, with a determined look, he thundered out 'And would I not, Sir? Shall the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland have its General Assembly, and the Church of England be denied its Convocation?' He was walking up and down the room while I told him the anecdote; but when he uttered this explosion of high-church zeal, he had come close to my chair, and his eyes flashed with indignation'. I bowed to the storm, and diverted the force of it, by leading him to expatiate on the influence which religion derived from maintaining the church with great external respectability.

I must not omit to mention that he this year wrote The Life of Ascham†, and the Dedication to the Earl of Shaftesburyt, prefixed to the edition of that writer's English works, published by Mr. Bennet'.

'Mrs. Piozzi says (Anec. p. 297) that Johnson's eyes were so wild, so piercing, and at times so fierce, that fear was, I believe, the first emotion in the hearts of all his beholders.'

Johnson was, in fact, the editor of this work, as appears from a letter of Mr. T. Davies to the Rev. Edm. Bettesworth :-' Reverend Sir, -I take the liberty to send you Roger Ascham's works in English. Though Mr. Bennet's name is in the title, the editor was in reality Mr. Johnson, the author of The Rambler, who wrote the life of the author, and added several notes. Mr. Johnson gave it to Mr. Bennet, for his advantage,' &c.-CROKER. Very likely Davies exaggerated Johnson's share in the book. Bennet's edition was published, not in 1763, but in 1761.

On

538

In the Harwich stage coach.

[A.D. 1763.

On Friday, August 5, we set out early in the morning in the Harwich stage coach. A fat elderly gentlewoman, and a young Dutchman, seemed the most inclined among us to conversation. At the inn where we dined, the gentlewoman said that she had done her best to educate her children; and particularly, that she had never suffered them to be a moment idle. JOHNSON. 'I wish, madam, you would educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all my life.' 'I am sure, Sir, (said she) you have not been idle.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Madam, it is very true; and that gentleman there (pointing to me,) has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever." I asked him privately how he could expose me so. JOHNSON. 'Poh, poh! (said he) they knew nothing about you, and will think of it no more.' In the afternoon the gentlewoman talked violently against the Roman Catholicks, and of the horrours of the Inquisition. To the utter astonishment of all the passengers but myself, who knew that he could talk upon any side of a question, he defended the Inquisition, and maintained, that 'false doctrine should be checked on its first appearance; that the civil power should unite with the church in punishing those who dared to attack the established religion, and that such only were punished by the Inquisition'.' He had in his pocket 'Pomponius Mela de situ Orbis,' in which he read occasionally, and seemed very intent upon ancient

'Lord Sheffield describes the change in Gibbon's opinions caused by the Reign of Terror:-' He became a warm and zealous advocate for every sort of old establishment. I recollect in a circle where French affairs were the topic and some Portuguese present, he, seemingly with seriousness, argued in favour of the Inquisition at Lisbon, and said he would not, at the present moment, give up even that old establishment.' Gibbon's Misc. Works, i. 328. One of Gibbon's correspondents told him in 1792, that the Wealth of Nations had been condemned by the Inquisition on account of 'the lowness of its style and the looseness of the morals which it inculcates.' Ib. ii. 479. See also post, May 7, 1773.

geography.

Aetat. 54.]

Blacklock's poetry.

539

geography. Though by no means niggardly, his attention to what was generally right was so minute, that having observed at one of the stages that I ostentatiously gave a shilling to the coachman, when the custom was for each passenger to give only six-pence, he took me aside and scolded me, saying that what I had done would make the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the passengers, who gave him no more than his due. This was a just reprimand; for in whatever way a man may indulge his generosity or his vanity in spending his money, for the sake of others he ought not to raise the price of any article for which there is a constant demand.

He talked of Mr. Blacklock's poetry, so far as it was descriptive of visible objects; and observed, that 'as its authour had the misfortune to be blind, we may be absolutely sure that such passages are combinations of what he has remembered of the works of other writers who could see. That foolish fellow, Spence, has laboured to explain philosophically how Blacklock may have done, by means of his own faculties, what it is impossible he should do.' The solution, as I have given it, is plain. Suppose, I know a man to be so lame that he is absolutely incapable to move himself, and I find him in a different room from that in which I left him; shall I puzzle myself with idle conjectures, that, perhaps, his nerves have by some unknown change all at once become effective?

'Johnson wrote on Aug. 17, 1773:-'This morning I saw at breakfast Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, who does not remember to have seen light, and is read to by a poor scholar in Latin, Greek, and French. He was originally a poor scholar himself. I looked on him with reverence.' Piozzi Letters, i. 110. See also Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 17, 1773. Spence published an Account of Blacklock, in which he meanly omitted any mention of Hume's great generosity to the blind poet. J. H. Burton's Hume, i. 392. Hume asked Blacklock whether he connected colour and sound. He answered, that as he met so often with the terms expressing colours, he had formed some false associations, but that they were of the intellectual kind. The illumination of the sun, for instance, he supposed to resemble the presence of a friend.' Ib. p. 389.

No,

540

Torture in Holland.

[A.D. 1763. No, Sir; it is clear how he got into a different room: he was carried.

Having stopped a night at Colchester', Johnson talked of that town with veneration, for having stood a siege for Charles the First. The Dutchman alone now remained with us. He spoke English tolerably well; and thinking to recommend himself to us by expatiating on the superiority of the criminal jurisprudence of this country over that of Holland, he inveighed against the barbarity of putting an accused person to the torture, in order to force a confession". But Johnson was as ready for this, as for the Inquisition. 'Why, Sir, you do not, I find, understand the law of your own country. The torture of Holland is considered as a favour

1

They left London early and yet they travelled only 51 miles that day. The whole distance to Harwich is 71 miles. Paterson's Itinerary, i. 323.

'Mackintosh (Life, ii. 162) writing of the time of William III, says that 'torture was legal in Scotland, and familiar in every country of Europe but England. Was there a single writer at that time who had objected to torture? I think not.' In the Gent. Mag. for 1742 (p. 660) it is stated that 'the King of Prussia has forbid the use of torture in his dominions.' In 1747 (p. 298) we read that Dr. Blackwell, an English physician, had been put to the torture in Sweden. Montesquieu in the Esprit des Lois, vi. 17, published in 1748, writing of la question ou torture contre les criminels,' says:-'Nous voyons aujourd'hui une nation très-bien policée [la nation anglaise] la rejeter sans inconvénient. Elle n'est donc pas nécessaire par sa nature.' Boswell in 1765 found that Paoli tortured a criminal with fire. Corsica, p. 158. Voltaire, in 1777, after telling how innocent men had been put to death with torture in the reign of Lewis XIV, continues

Mais un roi a-t-il le temps de songer à ces menus détails d'horreurs au milieu de ses fêtes, de ses conquêtes, et de ses maîtresses? Daignez vous en occuper, ô Louis XVI, vous qui n'avez aucune de ces distractions! Voltaire's Works, xxvi. 332. Johnson, two years before Voltaire thus wrote, had been shown la chambre de question—the torture-chamber-in Paris. Post, Oct. 17, 1775. It was not till the Revolution that torture was abolished in France. One of the Scotch judges in 1793, at the trial of Messrs. Palmer and Muir for sedition (post, June 3, 1781, note), 'asserted that now the torture was banished, there was no adequate punishment for sedition.' Parl. Hist. xxx. 1569.

to

Aetat. 54.] Johnson's relish for good eating.

541

to an accused person; for no man is put to the torture there, unless there is as much evidence against him as would amount to conviction in England. An accused person among you, therefore, has one chance more to escape punishment, than those who are tried among us.'

At supper this night he talked of good eating with uncommon satisfaction. Some people (said he,) have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else'.' He now appeared to me Jean Bull philosophe, and he was, for the moment, not only serious but vehement. Yet I have heard him, upon other occasions, talk with great contempt of people who were anxious to gratify their palates; and the 206th number of his Rambler is a masterly essay against gulosity'. His practice, indeed, I must acknowledge, may be considered as casting the balance of his different opinions upon this

A cheerful and good heart will have a care of his meat and drink.' Ecclesiasticus, xxx. 25.

'Verecundari neminem apud mensam decet, Nam ibi de divinis atque humanis cernitur.' Trinummus, act 2, sc. 4. Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 149) records that Johnson often said, "that wherever the dinner is ill got, there is poverty, or there is avarice, or there is stupidity; in short, the family is somehow grossly wrong; for," continued he, "a man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner; and if he cannot get that well dressed, he should be suspected of inaccuracy in other things." Yet he used to say that a man who rode out for an appetite consulted but little the dignity of human nature.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 204. This essay is more against the practices of the parasite than gulosity. It is entitled The art of living at the cost of others. Johnson wrote to one of Mrs. Thrale's children :-'Gluttony is, I think, less common among women than among men. Women commonly eat more sparingly, and are less curious in the choice of meat; but if once you find a woman gluttonous, expect from her very little virtue. Her mind is enslaved to the lowest and grossest temptation.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 298.

subject,