The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [903]
73. Life of Johnson, below, p. 120.
74. Ibid., p. 218.
75. Ibid., p. 315. It was an image which attracted the Admiration and even envy of Samuel Parr (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 352).
76. Life of Johnson, below, p. 56.
77. Ibid., p. 61.
78. Ibid., p. 688.
79. Ibid., p. 804. Cf. ‘Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it’ and ‘But it must be owned, that Johnson, though he could be rigidly abstemious, was not a temperate man either in eating or drinking’ (ibid., pp. 498, 246). Macaulay connected the exorbitancy of Johnson’s appetite to the reduced circumstances in which he found himself when he arrived in London to pursue a literary career: ‘He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse’ (Macaulay, review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, reprinted in Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1877), p. 182.
80. Life of Johnson, below, p. 700.
81. Ibid., p. 656. Cf. the information about Johnson’s drinking supplied to Boswell in November 1787 by William Bowles: ‘He had formerly drank a good deal (often two bottles at a sitting) and had often stayed in company till he was unable to walk out of it but he never found liquor affect his powers of thinking it affected only his limbs’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 192-3). James Abercrombie also recollected Johnson’s animation on the subject of drinking (ibid., p. 411).
82. ‘It is so much better for a man to be sure that he is never to be intoxicated, never to lose the power over himself (Life of Johnson, below, p. 656).
83. ‘When I drank wine, I scorned to drink it when in company. I have drunk many a bottle by myself; in the first place, because I had need of it to raise my spirits; in the second place, because I would have nobody to witness its effects upon me’ (ibid., p. 540); ‘Drinking may be practised with great prudence; a man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk… I used to slink home, when I had drunk too much’ (ibid., p. 733).
84. Richard B. Schwartz, ‘Boswell and Hume: The Deathbed Interview’, in Clingham, ed., New Light on Boswell, pp. 115–25. For an account of the function of the figure of Hume in the Life, see Greg Clingham, James Boswell: The Life of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 97–103. Another such antagonism would be that with Jonathan Swift, whom Johnson attacked ‘upon all occasions’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 433), and who he felt enjoyed ‘a higher reputation than he deserves’ (ibid., p. 238); on this see Claude Rawson, ‘The Character of Swift’s Satire: Reflections on Swift, Johnson, and Human Restlessness’, in Order From Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 3-67. Compare also Dalrymple’s contrasting of the characters of Swift and Johnson (Life of Johnson, below, p. 229).
85. Life of Johnson, below, p. 234.
86. Ibid. The reference is presumably to that period of his life when Johnson was ‘a sort of lax talker against religion’, before he read William Law’s Serious Call