QUOTING JOHNSON'S QUOTATIONS

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But, after all, this citation of familiar stories is less interesting than certain cases in which Byron refers in his Letters to passages which are scarcely what Johnson has said, but rather what he has quoted. On February 18th, 1814, Byron makes the following memorandum in his Journal, "Be not solitary, be not idle'-Um !-the idleness is troublesome; but I can't see so much to regret in the solitude." The ultimate reference is of course to the last paragraph but one of Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," where Democritus Junior offers this concluding piece of advice to all who are threatened by the disease. But it is not unlikely that the Journalist may also have had in his mind a certain letter of Johnson's (The Life, 1779, October 27th), in which Burton's counsel is quoted and recommended to the author of "The Hypochondriack." * In like

* In the winding-up of four letters addressed to John Murray, bearing the respective dates of Aug. 12th, 1817, Apr. 23rd, 1818, Aug. 12th, 1819, and Aug. 29th, 1819, Byron will be found greeting his correspondent with the phrase, "And so goodmorrow to you, good Master Lieutenant' -an uncommon and a rather cryptic greeting.

"

I say cryptic because I was never quite satisfied with thinking this a simple reference to the "Good-morrow, good lieutenant," of "Othello," Act iii. Scene 1, for I could see no particular point nor humour in altering an utterly commonplace Shakespearean sentence and repeating the sentence-so altered-on no less than four occasions. I felt that it must be a burlesque quotation; and my opinion was confirmed when, reading Boswell's letters written to the Rev. W. J. Temple, I suddenly came across the same sentence in Letter 51, dated Apr. 17th (?), 1775. Here is the passage and the dinner it alludes to will be found described in the Life of Johnson, under date Apr. 11th, 1775:

I am invited to a dinner on the banks of the Thames, at Richard Owen Cambridge's, where are to be Reynolds, Johnson, and Hermes' Harris!

manner, when Byron, writing to John Hamilton Reynolds, the friend and collaborateur of Keats, reminds him of "a saying of Dr Johnson's, which it is as well to remember, that no man was ever written down except by himself,"" the well-read Boswellian will recollect that the words (The Tour, 1773, October 1st) are not Johnson's own, but a quotation made by him of a saying of Bentley's. The terms in which Byron describes Sotheby-"that old rotten Medlar of Rhyme," are another instance in which Johnson is only the middle-man of a striking phrase. In one of his conversations on the Ethics of Convivial "Do you think so?' said he. Most certainly,' said I." Do you remember how I used to laugh at his style when we were in the Temple? He thinks himself an ancient Greek from these little peculiarities, as the imitators of Shakespeare, whom the Spectator mentions, thought they had done wonderfully when they had produced a line similar :

"And so good-morrow to ye, good Master Lieutenant."

I now thought I had run my quarry to ground, and hopefully consulted the pages of The Spectator. But though I ran over every number, and eventually secured the kind and valuable cooperation of Mr George A. Aitken-who has so ably edited both The Spectator and The Tatler-the search went unrewarded, no such allusion could be found or remembered. So there for the present I must leave the phrase, content with the interesting discovery that Boswell and Byron-who shared with one another an enthusiasm for Scotland and a very practical sympathy with "an oppressed nation bravely struggling to be free"--both hit upon the same evasive quotation.

As to the application of the words, that Mr Murray has been good enough to explain to me. He informs me that after his grandfather-John Murray the Second-was made a DeputyLieutenant he came in for no little good-humoured banter from his friends when he appeared at a levée in epaulettes, cocked hat and feathers, and a scarlet tunic. Byron, of course, heard of the matter, and-like the humorist he was-offered the "Good Master Lieutenant salutation as his own contribution to the gaiety of the occasion.

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ALLUSIONS VAGUE OR OBSCURE

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Drinking (The Life, 1776, April 12th), the Doctor says, "I also admit that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten. There are such men, but they are medlars"; but the figure is really borrowed from Congreve, who, when in "The Way of the World," Act i. Scene 5, he makes Fainall say, "Witwould grows by the Knight, like a medlar grafted on a crab"; and Mirabel reply, "So one will be rotten before he be ripe, and the other will be rotten without ever being ripe at all," is himself paraphrasingneedless to say-one of Rosalind's speeches in “As You Like It."

Finally, there are three allusions made to Johnson in these Letters of Byron's which can only be described as either vague or obscure. For instance, Byron commences his second letter to Murray by remarking that "the time seems to be past when (as Dr Johnson said) a man was certain to hear the truth from his bookseller."" I must frankly confess that I cannot discover when or where Johnson made this remark. Nor-though I have searched the Life, the Tour, the essay on the Metaphysical School contained in the Lives of the Poets, and the two earliest editions of Cleveland's own poems-can I find any clue to another dictum which Byron ascribes to Johnson, a dictum quoted in a letter to Moore: "They can't say I have truckled to the times, nor to popular topics, as Johnson, or somebody, said of Cleveland.' On the other hand, I have, I believe, discovered a reference to the Life, which baffled no less erudite a Johnsonian than Dr Birbeck Hill. In his famous letter to Sir Walter Scott, which bears

date 1822, January 12th, Byron appeals to his correspondent, "You disclaim jealousies'; but I would ask, as Boswell did of Johnson, of whom could you be jealous?'-of none of the living certainly, and (taking all and all into consideration) of which of the dead?" So far as I can see, it is what Boswell says of Johnson, not what he says to him, that is here alluded to. For, after recording one of the Doctor's frequent attacks on Gray, and announcing his own divergence from his master's opinions, Boswell defends him (The Life, 1763, June 25th) from the imputation of being "actuated by envy" of Gray, in words to which Byron probably refers in addressing Sir Walter: "Alas; ye little short-sighted critics, could Johnson be envious of the talents of any of his contemporaries?"

That this peculiar interest shown by Byron in Johnson was something more than a matter of literary affinity or of hero-worship, I, for one, do not for a moment doubt. It seems to me indeed to have been a case of intense sympathy rather than of deep interest and I take it there can be no question that the "noble lord's" temperament and cast of mind, no less than his taste in books, were in many respects identical with those of the great moralist. Two men so virile and red-blooded, so quick-tempered and yet so patient, so masculine and robust in sense and judgment, such true "men of the world" in outlook and experience, were naturally bound to agree in certain other essential respects, and it need occasion no great surprise to discover that the qualities of ineradicable humour, of pugnacity and love of controversy, of pride and independence of spirit, of

BYRON'S JOHNSONIAN CHARACTERISTICS xxiii

real humanity and affection, and of hatred of injustice and oppression, were as strongly developed in Byron as in Johnson. What is really significant is the fact that when these main points of likeness are once made out, quite a number of common traits can be recalled, all subordinate, it may be, but all helping to complete the resemblance here suggested. Leniency to dependants, servants, and animals; aptness, vivacity, and variety in and variety in conversation; alternate abstinence and voracity in the use of food and of drink; indifference verging on hostility to the charms of music and of pictures; and a morbid melancholy, due in great measure to a rooted Calvinistic belief;-all these are features recognisable as clearly in Byron as in Johnson. And when I add that the younger man resembled the elder in an addiction to the use of opium, in meditating the making of a tour to the Hebrides, in studying a new and rather difficult language in order to test his mind, in having enjoyed the honour of discussing literature with his sovereign, in writing books and giving his friends the profits of them, in trying to secure the publication of a book entrusted to him by some friendly monks, and in finding his mother's precepts no very satisfactory guide to right conduct I have drawn a parallel between Byron and Johnson which I cannot help thinking is rather remarkable. Moreover, I find the Byronic and the Johnsonian points of view often quaintly similar. Both believed in the great advantages of foreign travel; both held that it was a good thing to give a promising servant a good education; both conceived that a man of mind can do anything; both maintained that too many