The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [466]
On Friday, April 10, I found Johnson at home in the morning. We resumed the conversation of yesterday. He put me in mind of some of it which had escaped my memory, and enabled me to record it more perfectly than I otherwise could have done. He was much pleased with my paying so great attention to his recommendation in 1763, the period when our acquaintance began, that I should keep a journal; and I could perceive he was secretly pleased to find so much of the fruit of his mind preserved; and as he had been used to imagine and say that he always laboured when he said a good thing – it delighted him, on a review, to find that his conversation teemed with point and imagery.
I said to him, ‘You were yesterday, Sir, in remarkably good humour: but there was nothing to offend you, nothing to produce irritation or violence. There was no bold offender. There was not one capital conviction. It was a maiden assize. You had on your white gloves.’
He found fault with our friend Langton for having been too silent. ‘Sir, (said I,) you will recollect, that he very properly took up Sir Joshua for being glad that Charles Fox had praised Goldsmith’s Traveller, and you joined him.’ JOHNSON. ‘Yes, Sir, I knocked Fox on the head, without ceremony. Reynolds is too much under Fox and Burke at present. He is under the Fox star and the Irish constellation. He is always under some planet.’ BOSWELL. ‘There is no Fox star.’ JOHNSON. ‘But there is a dog star.’ BOSWELL. ‘They say, indeed, a fox and a dog are the same animal.’
I reminded him of a gentleman,787 who, Mrs. Cholmondeley said, was first talkative from affectation, and then silent from the same cause; that he first thought, ‘I shall be celebrated as the liveliest man in every company;’ and then, all at once, ‘O! it is much more respectable to be grave and look wise.’ ‘He has reversed the Pythagorean discipline, by being first talkative, and then silent. He reverses the course of Nature too: he was first the gay butterfly, and then the creeping worm.’ Johnson laughed loud and long at this expansion and illustration of what he himself had told me.
We dined together with Mr. Scott (now Sir William Scott, his Majesty’s Advocate General,) at his chambers in the Temple, nobody else there. The company being small, Johnson was not in such spirits as he had been the preceding day, and for a considerable time little was said. At last he burst forth, ‘Subordination is sadly broken down in this age. No man, now, has the same authority which his father had, – except a gaoler. No master has it over his servants: it is diminished in our colleges; nay, in our grammar-schools.’ BOSWELL. ‘What is the cause of this, Sir?’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, the coming in of the Scotch,’ (laughing sarcastically.) BOSWELL. ‘That is to say, things have been turned topsy turvey. – But your serious cause.’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, there are many causes, the chief of which is, I think, the great increase of money. No man now depends upon the Lord of a Manour, when he can send to another country, and fetch provisions. The shoe-black at the entry of my court does not depend on me. I can deprive him but of a penny a day, which he hopes somebody else will bring him; and that penny I must carry to another shoe-black, so the trade suffers nothing. I have explained, in my Journey to the Hebrides, how gold and silver destroy feudal subordination. But, besides, there is a general relaxation of reverence. No son now depends upon his father as in former times. Paternity used to be considered as of itself a great thing, which had a right to many claims. That is, in general, reduced to very small bounds. My hope is, that as anarchy produces tyranny, this extreme relaxation will produce freni strictio.’788
Talking of fame, for which there is so great a desire, I observed how little there is of it in reality, compared with the other objects of human attention. ‘Let every man recollect, and he will be sensible how small a part of his time is employed in talking or thinking of