of Lord Sidney Beauclerk, fifth son of the first Duke of St. Alban's, and consequently a great-grandson of Charles II. and Nell Gwynn. He was a great lover of literature, and at his death left a library of thirty thousand volumes especially rich in English drama and English history. Boswell says: "Mr. Beauclerk's being of the St. Alban's family, and having in some particulars a resemblance to Charles the Second, contributed in Johnson's imagination to throw a lustre upon his other qualities, and in a short time, the moral, pious Johnson, and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk, were companions. 'What a coalition!' (said Garrick when he heard of this; ) 'I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Round-house.' But I can bear testimony that it was a very agreeable association. Beauclerk was too polite, and valued learning and wit too much, to offend Johnson by sallies of wit and licentiousness; and Johnson delighted in the good qualities of Beauclerk, and hoped to correct the evil. Innumerable were the scenes in which Johnson was amused by these young men. [Boswell gives a most entertaining account of a 'frisk' of Johnson with Langton and Beauclerk, who once after midnight routed the grave philosopher out of his bed and took him about the town.] Beauclerk could take more liberty with him than anybody with whom I ever saw him; but, on the other hand, Beauclerk was not spared by his respectable companion, when reproof was proper." 16. James Boswell (1740-1795). Macaulay is extreme in his judgment of Boswell, or "Bozzy," as Johnson affectionately called him. In his essay on Croker's Edition of Boswell, he is even more severe. Carlyle, in his essay on Boswell's Johnson, while admitting gross defects, does justice to Boswell's undoubted merits. The student should read both essays, of which copious extracts are given in the Appendix. A part of the two views of Boswell is given here. "We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account, or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect." "Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd." "That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no supe "Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye; visible, palpable to the dullest. His good qualities, again, belonged not to the Time he lived in; were far from common then; indeed, in such a degree, were almost unexampled; not recognizable therefore by every one; nay, apt even (so strange had they grown) to be confounded with the very vices they lay contiguous to, and had sprung out of.” "Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an illassorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, indeed, is man's life generally but a kind of beastgodhood; the god in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving more and more to subdue it under his feet?" "Nay, sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of him; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities that he did his good work; as if it were the rior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idot, and by another as a being 'Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll.' La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, with very fact of his being among the worst men in this world that had enabled him to write one of the best books therein ! Falser hypothesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by its nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything is by its very nature good. Alas, that there should be teachers in Israel, or even learners, to whom this world-ancient fact is still problematical, or even deniable! Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Open-mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness: wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but Reverence, which is the highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have out sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson." -Macaulay. found his way from Boswell's environment to Johnson's: if such worship for real Godmade superiors showed itself also as worship for apparent Tailor-made superiors, even as hollow interested mouth-worship for such, the case, in this composite human nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity! But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last article of Faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worth the name: That neither James Boswell's good Book, nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof."-Carlyle. P. 46, 1. 6. Wilkes, John (1727-1797). A prominent English politician of the latter half of the eighteenth century. "Wilkes was a worthless profligate, but he had a remarkable faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side, and, by a singular irony of fortune, he became the chief instrument in bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Constitution has ever made. He woke the nation to the need of Parliamentary reform by his defence of the rights of constituencies against the despotism of the House of Commons. He took the lead in the struggle which put an end to the secrecy I of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish the right of the Press to discuss public affairs."- Green's History, Ch. X., Sec. II. 8. Whitfield or Whitefield, George (1714-1770). The founder of the sect of Calvinistic Methodists, who separated from the Wesleyan Methodists in 1741. "Whitefield's preaching was such as England had never heard before, theatrical, extravagant, often commonplace; but hushing all criticism by its intense reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep, tremulous sympathy with the sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthusiast who could wring gold from the close-fisted Franklin, and admiration from the fastidious Horace Walpole ; or, who could look down from the top of a green knoll at Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal pits; and see, as he preached, the tears making white channels down their blackened cheeks.". Green's History, Ch. X., Sec. I. 20. Johnson was a water drinker. Boswell reports: “Talking of drinking wine, he [Johnson] said, 'I did not leave off wine because I could not bear it; I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it. University College has witnessed this.' Boswell. 'Why then, Sir, did you leave it off?' JOHNSON. Why, Sir, because it is so much better for a man to be sure that he is never to be intoxicated, never to lose power over himself. . . . There is more happiness in being rational. . . [And elsewhere] 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.'" |