The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [501]
Still he would not yield. He proceeded: ‘Will you not allow, Sir, that vice does not hurt a man’s character so as to obstruct his prosperity in life, when you know that––––––871 was loaded with wealth and honours; a man who had acquired his fortune by such crimes, that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat.’ BOSWELL. ‘You will recollect, Sir, that Dr. Robertson said, he cut his throat because he was weary of still life; little things not being sufficient to move his great mind.’ JOHNSON. (very angry,) ‘Nay, Sir, what stuff is this! You had no more this opinion after Robertson said it, than before. I know nothing more offensive than repeating what one knows to be foolish things, by way of continuing a dispute, to see what a man will answer, – to make him your butt!’ (angrier still.) BOSWELL. ‘My dear Sir, I had no such intention as you seem to suspect; I had not indeed. Might not this nobleman have felt every thing “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,”872 as Hamlet says?’ JOHNSON. ‘Nay, if you are to bring in gabble, I’ll talk no more. I will not, upon my honour.’ – My readers will decide upon this dispute.
Next morning I stated to Mrs. Thrale at breakfast, before he came down, the dispute of last night as to the influence of character upon success in life. She said he was certainly wrong; and told me, that a Baronet873 lost an election in Wales, because he had debauched the sister of a gentleman in the county, whom he made one of his daughters invite as her companion at his seat in the country, when his lady and his other children were in London. But she would not encounter Johnson upon the subject.
I staid all this day with him at Streatham. He talked a great deal, in very good humour.
Looking at Messrs. Dilly’s splendid edition of Lord Chesterfield’s miscellaneous works, he laughed, and said, ‘Here now are two speeches ascribed to him, both of which were written by me: and the best of it is, they have found out that one is like Demosthenes, and the other like Cicero.’
He censured Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man, for misrepresenting Clarendon’s account of the appearance of Sir George Villiers’s ghost, as if Clarendon were weakly credulous; when the truth is, that Clarendon only says, that the story was upon a better foundation of credit, than usually such discourses are founded upon; nay, speaks thus of the person who was reported to have seen the vision, ‘the poor man, if he had been at all waking;’ which Lord Kames has omitted. He added, ‘in this book it is maintained that virtue is natural to man, and that if we would but consult our own hearts we should be virtuous. Now after consulting our own hearts all we can, and with all the helps we have, we find how few of us are virtuous. This is saying a thing which all mankind know not to be true.’ BOSWELL. ‘Is not modesty natural?’ JOHNSON. ‘I cannot say, Sir, as we find no people quite in a state of nature; but I think the more they are taught, the more modest they are. The French are a gross, ill-bred, untaught people; a lady there will spit on the floor and rub it with her foot. What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country. Time may be employed to more advantage