The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [929]
619. Hutchinson: Francis Hutcheson.
620. a lady who knew Johnson well: Possibly Mrs Thrale.
621. ‘asses of great charge’ introduced: Hamlet, V.ii.44. Johnson glosses the phrase as ‘Asses heavily loaded’; see n. 622.
622. ‘To be, or not to be,’ is disputable: Hamlet, III.i.58–90. Johnson’s note on this soliloquy begins, ‘Of this celebrated soliloquy, which bursting from a man distracted with contrariety of desires, and overwhelmed with the magnitude of his own purposes, is connected rather in the speaker’s mind, than on his tongue, I shall endeavour to discover the train, and shew how one sentiment produces another.’ The quotes come from Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare in eight volumes (1765). The best modern edition of the commentary is probably Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. B. H. Bronson and J. M. O’Meara (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986); however, the note on ‘asses of great charge’ is not reprinted in this selection.
623. A gentleman: George Steevens.
624. a splendid table: The Earl of Pembroke’s, at Wilton, near Salisbury.
625. a gentleman: James Boswell.
626. one of his political agents: Robert Scotland.
627. pars magna fui: ‘I was a large part’ – Virgil, Aeneid, ii.5.
628. mine own friend and my Father’s friend: Untraced.
629. Jack Ketch: A hangman.
630. patriotick friends: Johnson gave as the primary meaning of ‘patriot’ ‘One whose ruling passion is the love of his country’; but in the fourth edition of his Dictionary he supplemented that primary meaning with a secondary meaning, ‘It is sometimes used for a factious disturber of the government’, thereby alluding to the way in which, during his lifetime, patriotism had been invoked as the pretext for agitation which Johnson regarded as disaffected and mischievous.
631. indifferent…to go or stay: Joseph Addison, Cato (1713), V.i.40, p. 57 (where however the line reads, ‘Indifferent in his choice to sleep or die’).
632. Gretna-Green: The most southerly village in Scotland, and therefore the first place in which fugitives from England might be married according to Scottish law, which did not require parental assent for those who had not yet attained their majority.
633. One of the company: Edward Dilly.
634. A merry Andrew: A person who entertains people with antics and buffoonery; a clown (OED).
635. Scrub: A low comic character in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem.
636. Each… what they understand: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), ll. 66-7.
637. l’esprit du corps: The regard entertained by the members of a body for the honour and interests of the body as a whole, and of each other as belonging to it (OED, 2).
638. making Birnamwood march to Dunsinane: In Macbeth, V.iv-v.
639. The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty: Milton, ‘L’Allegro’, l. 36.
640. Off with his head… Aylesbury: Cf. Colley Cibber, The Tragical History of King Richard III (1735), p. 57.
641. Difficile… dicere: ‘It is difficult to speak of common things in your own way’ – Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 128.
642. Tuque… primus: Ibid., ll. 128–30; for the translation, see below (n. 644).
643. Epistola ad Pisones: An alternative, and technically more correct, way of referring to Horace’s Ars Poetica.
644. Si quid… aut operis lex: ‘If it is an untried theme you entrust to the stage, and if you boldly fashion a fresh character, make it the same at the end as it is at the beginning, and have it self-consistent. It is difficult to speak of common things in your own way; and it is more proper for you to spin into acts a song of Troy than if, for the first time, you were giving the world an unknown and unsung theme. You may acquire private rights in common ground, provided you will neither linger in the one hackneyed and easy round, nor trouble to render word for word, with the fidelity of the translator. Nor by your mode of imitating should you take the “leap into the pit” out of which shame, if not the law of your work, will forbid you to stir hand or foot to escape’ – ibid., ll. 125–35.
645.