The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [902]
40. Life of Johnson, below, p. 668. The ‘gentleman’ was in fact Boswell, as we know from his journal, and the suppression of the fact in the text of the Life is an interesting example of how Boswell’s personal vanity could come into conflict with his literary ambition to make the work as full and detailed as possible. In 1786, however, Boswell could be candid in a letter to Malone that his practice with Johnson was sometimes to ‘[tease] him long, to bring out all I could’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 114).
41. ‘Peter Pindar’ (i.e. John Wolcot) published in 1786 A Poetical and Congratulatory Epistle to James Boswell which however reported Johnson’s indignation and incredulity at the idea that Boswell might be his biographer: ‘Boswell write my life! why the fellow possesses not abilities for writing the life of an ephemeron’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 112, n. 4).
42. Life of Johnson, below, p. 731.
43. Ibid., p. 633.
44. When compiling the Life Boswell was advised by correspondents such as Anna Seward that he should not pass over in silence subjects where Johnson may have been in error: ‘The genuine lovers of the poetic science look with anxious eyes to Mr. Boswell, desiring that every merit of the stupendous mortal may be shewn in its fairest light; but expecting also, that impartial justice, so worthy of a generous mind, which the popular cry cannot influence to flatter the object of discrimination, nor yet the yearnings of remembered amity induce, to invest that object with unreal perfection, injurious, from the severity of his censures, to the rights of others’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 65).
45. For an estimation of the number of days Boswell and Johnson could have spent together – a surprisingly small number, as it turns out – see P. A. W. Collins, ‘Boswell’s Contact with Johnson’, Notes and Queries, 201 (1956), pp. 163-6.
46. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 262, 285, 320, 706, 975.
47. Ibid., p. 736.
48. Ibid., p. 758.
49. Ibid., p. 975.
50. Ibid., p. 706.
51. Ibid., p. 212.
52. Ibid., p. 296.
53. Ibid., p. 311. Cf. Reynolds and Boswell on Johnson’s unceremonious alacrity of riposte: ‘Sir Joshua observed to me the extraordinary promptitude with which Johnson flew upon an argument. “Yes, (said I,) he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with his sword; he is through your body in an instant”’ (ibid., p. 456.). Cf. also William Hamilton on the two modes of Johnsonian conversation (ibid., pp. 824-5).
54. Ibid., p. 235, 743.
55. Ibid., p. 232.
56. Ibid., p. 531. Cf. ‘Johnson could not brook appearing to be worsted in argument, even when he had taken the wrong side, to shew the force and dexterity of his talents’ (ibid., p. 824).
57. Ibid., p. 1006.
58. Ibid., p. 383.
59. Ibid., p. 866.
60. Ibid., p. 769.
61. Ibid., p. 918.
62. Ibid., pp. 142-3. For an excellent reading of this letter, see Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 141-2.
63. Ibid., p. 504.
64. Ibid., p. 442.
65. Ibid., p. 480.
66. This is the useful phrase of Daniel Astle writing to Boswell in December 1786 (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 144).
67. Life of Johnson, below, p. 248.
68. In his essay ‘On Ridicule’, published in November 1782, Boswell had approvingly quoted Brown’s dismissal of those ‘coxcombs’ who ‘vanquish Berkeley with a grin’ (Bailey, ed., Boswell’s Column, p. 315).
69. For the virtue of chastisement in education, see Life of Johnson, below, pp. 29–30. For Johnson’s dwelling upon religious punishments rather than redemption, see the quoted comments of Anna Seward (ibid., pp. 27-8).
70. Ibid., p. 472.
71. Ibid., p. 342.
72. ‘… in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homogeneous languages…’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed.