Heb Dw, Heb Dym,Dw o' diggon.
Heb Dw, Heb Dym,Dw o' diggon.
Heb Dw, Heb Dym,Dw o' diggon.
And though of no very difficult construction, the gentleman seemed wholly confounded, and unable to explain them; till Mr. Johnson, having picked out the meaning by little and little, said to the man, "Hebis a preposition, I believe, Sir, is it not?" My countryman recovering some spirits upon the sudden question, cried out, "So I humbly presume, Sir," very comically.' Piozzi'sAnec. p. 238. The Welsh words, which are the Myddelton motto, mean, 'Without God, without all. God is all-sufficient.'Piozzi MS. Croker'sBoswell, p. 423.
[1231]In 1809 the whole income for Llangwinodyl, including surplice fees, amounted to forty-six pounds two shillings and twopence, and for Tydweilliog, forty-three pounds nineteen shillings and tenpence; so that it does not appear that Mr. Thrale carried into effect his good intention. DUPPA.
[1232]Mr. Thrale was near-sighted, and could not see the goats browsing on Snowdon, and he promised his daughter, who was a child of ten years old, a penny for every goat she would shew him, and Dr. Johnson kept the account; so that it appears her father was in debt to her one hundred and forty-nine pence. Queeny was the epithet, which had its origin in the nursery, by which Miss Thrale was always distinguished by Johnson. DUPPA. Her name was Esther. The allusion was to Queen Esther. Johnson often pleasantly mentions her in his letters to her mother. Thus on July 27, 1780, he writes:—'As if I might not correspond with my Queeney, and we might not tell one another our minds about politicks or morals, or anything else. Queeney and I are both steady and may be trusted; we are none of the giddy gabblers, we think before we speak.'Piozzi Letters, ii. 169. Four days later he wrote:—'Tell my pretty dear Queeney, that when we meet again, we will have, at least for some time, two lessons in a day. I love her and think on her when I am alone; hope we shall be very happy together and mind our books.'Ib. p. 173.
[1233]Seeante, iv. 421, for the inscription on an urn erected by Mr. Myddelton 'on the banks of a rivulet where Johnson delighted to stand and repeat verses.' On Sept. 18, 1777, Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale: —'Mr. ——'s erection of an urn looks like an intention to bury me alive; I would as willingly see my friend, however benevolent and hospitable, quietly inurned. Let him think for the present of some more acceptable memorial.'Piozzi Letters, i. 371.
[1234]Johnson wrote on Oct. 24, 1778:—'My two clerical friends Darby and Worthington have both died this month. I have known Worthington long, and to die is dreadful. I believe he was a very good man.'Piozzi Letters, ii. 26.
[1235]Thomas, the second Lord Lyttelton. DUPPA.
[1236]Mr. Gwynn the architect was a native of Shrewsbury, and was at this time completing a bridge across the Severn, called the English Bridge: besides this bridge, he built one at Acham, over the Severn, near to Shrewsbury; and the bridges at Worcester, Oxford [Magdalen Bridge], and Henley. DUPPA. He was also the architect of the Oxford Market, which was opened in 1774.Oxford during the Last Century, ed. 1859, p. 45. Johnson and Boswell travelled to Oxford with him in March, 1776.Ante, ii. 438. In 1778 he got into some difficulties, in which Johnson tried to help him, as is shewn by the following autograph letter in the possession of my friend Mr. M. M. Holloway:—
'SIR,
'SIR,
'Poor Mr. Gwyn is in great distress under the weight of the late determination against him, and has still hopes that some mitigation may be obtained. If it be true that whatever has by his negligence been amiss, may be redressed for a sum much less than has been awarded, the remaining part ought in equity to be returned, or, what is more desirable, abated. When the money is once paid, there is little hope of getting it again.
'The load is, I believe, very hard upon him; he indulges some flattering opinions that by the influence of his academical friends it may be lightened, and will not be persuaded but that some testimony of my kindness may be beneficial. I hope he has been guilty of nothing worse than credulity, and he then certainly deserves commiseration. I never heard otherwise than that he was an honest man, and I hope that by your countenance and that of other gentlemen who favour or pity him some relief may be obtained.
'I am, Sir, 'Your most humble servant, 'SAM. JOHNSON.' 'Bolt Court, Fleet-street, 'Jan. 30, 1778.'
[1237]An ancestor of mine, a nursery-gardener, Thomas Wright by name, after whom my grandfather, Thomas Wright Hill, was called, planted this walk. The tradition preserved in my family is that on his wedding-day he took six men with him and planted these trees. When blamed for keeping the wedding-dinner waiting, he answered, that if what he had been doing turned out well, it would be of far more value than a wedding-dinner.
[1238]The Rector of St. Chad's, in Shrewsbury. He was appointed Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, in the following year. Seeante, ii. 441.
[1239]'I have heard Dr. Johnson protest that he never had quite as much as he wished of wall-fruit except once in his life, and that was when we were all together at Ombersley.' Piozzi'sAnec. p. 103. Mrs. Thrale wrote to him in 1778:—'Mr. Scrase gives us fine fruit; I wished you my pear yesterday; but then what would one pear have done for you?'Piozzi Letters, ii. 36. It seems unlikely that Johnson should not at Streatham have had all the wall-fruit that he wished.
[1240]This visit was not to Lord Lyttelton, but to his uncle [afterwards by successive creations, Lord Westcote, and Lord Lyttelton], the father of the present Lord Lyttelton, who lived at a house called Little Hagley. DUPPA. Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale in 1771:—'I would have been glad to go to Hagley in compliance with Mr. Lyttelton's kind invitation, for beside the pleasure of his conversation I should have had the opportunity of recollecting past times, and wanderingper montes notos et flumina nota, of recalling the images of sixteen, and reviewing my conversations with poor Ford.'Piozzi Letters, i. 42. He had been at school at Stourbridge, close by Hagley.Ante, i. 49. See Walpole'sLetters, ix. 123, for an anecdote of Lord Westcote.
[1241]Horace Walpole, writing of Hagley in Sept. 1753 (Letters, ii. 352), says:—'There is extreme taste in the park: the seats are not the best, but there is not one absurdity. There is a ruined castle, built by Miller, that would get him his freedom even of Strawberry [Walpole's own house at Twickenham]: it has the true rust of the Barons' Wars.'
[1242]'Mrs. Lyttelton forced me to play at whist against my liking, and her husband took away Johnson's candle that he wanted to read by at the other end of the room. Those, I trust, were the offences.'PiozziMS.CROKER.
[1243]Johnson (Works, viii. 409) thus writes of Shenstone and the Leasowes:—'He began to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. .... For awhile the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress by conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception; injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain. Where there is emulation there will be vanity; and where there is vanity there will be folly. The pleasure of Shenstone was all in his eye: he valued what he valued merely for its looks; nothing raised his indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his water.' Seeante, p. 345.
[1244]Seeante, iii. 187, and v. 429.
[1245]'He spent his estate in adorning it, and his death was probably hastened by his anxieties. He was a lamp that spent its oil in blazing. It is said that if he had lived a little longer he would have been assisted by a pension: such bounty could not have been ever more properly bestowed.' Johnson'sWorks, viii. 410. His friend, Mr. Graves, the author ofThe Spiritual Quixote, in a note on this passage says that, if he was sometimes distressed for money, yet he was able to leave legacies and two small annuities.
[1246]Mr. Duppa—without however giving his authority—says that this was Dr. Wheeler, mentionedante, iii. 366. TheBirmingham Directoryfor the year 1770 shews that there were two tradesmen in the town of that name, one having the same Christian name, Benjamin, as Dr. Wheeler.
[1247]Boswell visited these works in 1776.Ante, ii. 459.
[1248]Burke in the House of Commons on Jan. 25, 1771, in a debate on Falkland's Island, said of the Spanish Declaration:—'It was made, I admit, on the true principles of trade and manufacture. It puts me in mind of a Birmingham button which has passed through an hundred hands, and after all is not worth three-halfpence a dozen.'Parl. Hist.xvi. 1345.
[1249]Johnson and Boswell drove through the Park in 1776.Ante, ii. 451.
[1250]'My friend the late Lord Grosvenor had a house at Salt Hill, where I usually spent a part of the summer, and thus became acquainted with that great and good man, Jacob Bryant. Here the conversation turned one morning on a Greek criticism by Dr. Johnson in some volume lying on the table, which I ventured (for I was then young) to deem incorrect, and pointed it out to him. I could not help thinking that he was somewhat of my opinion, but he was cautious and reserved. "But, Sir," said I, willing to overcome his scruples, "Dr. Johnson himself admitted that he was not a good Greek scholar." "Sir," he replied, with a serious and impressive air, "it is not easy for us to say what such a man as Johnson would call a good Greek scholar." I hope that I profited by that lesson—certainly I never forgot it.' Gifford'sWorks of Ford, vol. i. p. lxii. Croker'sBoswell, p. 794. 'So notorious is Mr. Bryant's great fondness for studying and proving the truths of the creation according to Moses, that he told me himself, and with much quaint humour, a pleasantry of one of his friends in giving a character of him:—"Bryant," said he, "is a very good scholar, and knows all things whatever up to Noah, but not a single thing in the world beyond the Deluge."' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, iii. 229.
[1251]This is a work written by William Durand, Bishop of Mende, and printed on vellum, in folio, by Fust and Schoeffer, in Mentz, 1459. It is the third book that is known to be printed with a date. DUPPA. It is perhaps the first book with a date printed in movable metal type.Brunei, ed. 1861, ii. 904. Seeante, ii. 397.
[1252]Dr. Johnson, in another column of hisDiary, has put down, in a note, 'First printed book in Greek, Lascaris'sGrammar, 4to, Mediolani, 1476.' The imprint of this book is,Mediolani Impressum per Magistrum Dionysium Paravisinum. M.CCCC.LXXVI. Die xxx Januarii. The first book printed in the English language was theHistoryes of Troye, printed in 1471. DUPPA. A copy of theHistoryes of Troyis exhibited in the Bodleian Library with the following superscription:—'Lefevre'sRecuyell of the historyes of Troye. The first book printed in the English language. Issued by Caxton at Bruges about 1474.'
[1253]The Battle of the Frogs and Mice. The first edition was printed by Laonicus Cretensis, 1486. DUPPA.
[1254]Mr. Coulson was a Senior Fellow of University College. Lord Stowell informed me that he was very eccentric. He would on a fine day hang out of the college windows his various pieces of apparel to air, which used to be universally answered by the young men hanging out from all the other windows, quilts, carpets, rags, and every kind of trash, and this was called anillumination. His notions of the eminence and importance of his academic situation were so peculiar, that, when he afterwards accepted a college living, he expressed to Lord Stowell his doubts whether, after living so long in thegreat world, he might not grow weary of the comparative retirement of a country parish. CROKER. Seeante, ii. 382, note.
[1255]Dr. Robert Vansittart, Fellow of All Souls, and Regius Professor of Law. DUPPA. Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale on Nov. 3, 1773:—'Poor V———! There are not so many reasons as he thinks why he should envy me, but there are some; he wants what I have, a kind and careful mistress; and wants likewise what I shall want at my return. He is a good man, and when his mind is composed a man of parts.'Piozzi Letters, i. 197. Seeante, i. 348.
[1256]Seeante, ii. 285, note 3.
THE END OF THE FIFTH VOLUME.
THE END OF THE FIFTH VOLUME.