The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [199]
The study of the law is what you very justly term it, copious and generous;c and in adding your name to its professors, you have done exactly what I always wished, when I wished you best. I hope that you will continue to pursue it vigorously and constantly. You gain, at least, what is no small advantage, security from those troublesome and wearisome discontents, which are always obtruding themselves upon a mind vacant, unemployed, and undetermined.
‘You ought to think it no small inducement to diligence and perseverance, that they will please your father. We all live upon the hope of pleasing somebody; and the pleasure of pleasing ought to be greatest, and at last always will be greatest, when our endeavours are exerted in consequence of our duty.
‘Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another, upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.
‘If, therefore, the profession you have chosen has some unexpected inconveniences, console yourself by reflecting that no profession is without them; and that all the importunities and perplexities of business are softness and luxury, compared with the incessant cravings of vacancy, and the unsatisfactory expedients of idleness.
“Hcec sunt quce nosträ potui te voce monere;
Vade, age.”229
‘As to your History of Corsica, you have no materials which others have not, or may not have. You have, somehow or other, warmed your imagination. I wish there were some cure, like the lover’s leap, for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession. Mind your own affairs, and leave the Corsicans to theirs. I am, dear Sir, your most humble servant,
‘London, Aug. 21, 1766.’ ‘SAM. JOHNSON.’
‘To DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON
‘Auchinleck, Nov. 6, 1766.
‘MUCH ESTEEMED aND DEAR SIR, – I plead not guilty to ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗a
‘Having thus, I hope, cleared myself of the charge brought against me, I presume you will not be displeased if I escape the punishment which you have decreed for me unheard. If you have discharged the arrows of criticism against an innocent man, you must rejoice to find they have missed him, or have not been pointed so as to wound him.
‘To talk no longer in allegory, I am, with all deference, going to offer a few observations in defence of my Latin, which you have found fault with.
‘You think I should have used spei primce, instead of spei alterce. Spes is, indeed, often used to express something on which we have a future dependence, as in Virg. Eclog. i. l. 14,
“––––––modo namque gemellos
Spem gregis ah silice in nuda connixa reliquit.”230
and in Georg. iii. l. 473,
“Spemque gregemque simul,”231
for the lambs and the sheep. Yet it is also used to express any thing on which we have a present dependence, and is well applied to a man of distinguished influence, our support, our refuge, our prcesidium232 as Horace calls Maecenas. So, æneid xii. l. 57, Queen Amata addresses her son-in-law Turnus: – “Spes tu nunc una:” and he was then no future hope, for she adds,
“––––––decus imperiumque Latini
Te penes;”233
which might have been said of my Lord Bute some years ago. Now I consider the present Earl of Bute to be “Excelsce families de Bute spes prima;” and my Lord Mountstuart, as his eldest son, to be “spes altera.”234 So in æneid xii. l. 168, after having mentioned Pater æneas, who was the present spes, the reigning spes, as my German friends would say, the spes prima, the poet adds,
“Et juxta Ascanius, magnx spes altera Romce.”235
‘You think aliens ungrammatical, and you tell me it should have been altert. You must recollect, that in old times alter was declined regularly; and when the ancient fragments preserved in the Juris Civilis Fontes236 were written, it was certainly declined in the way that I use it. This, I should think,