—To make the worse appear
The better argument,
and were therefore in no danger of being misled by it. But an excuse of the same kind will serve for the common liar, that he is known, and therefore disbelieved. It behoved him to be the more scrupulous in this particular, because he knew that Boswell took minutes of his ordinary conversation. Some of his idle sophisms, which thus became current, have, I fear, led to serious mischief; such as the opinion that an author may be at liberty to deny his having written a book to which he has not affixed his name; his extenuation of incontinence in the master of a family, and the gloss he put on the crime of covetousness; which last error was not confined to his conversation, but mingled itself with his writings, though no one could well be freer from any taint of the vice in his own life. Many a man may have indulged his inclinations to evil, with much less compunction, while he has imagined himself sheltered under the sanction of the moralist who watches one side of the entrance into the nave of St. Paul's.
There was, in his mind, a strange mixture of credulity and doubtfulness. He did not disbelieve either in the existence of ghosts, or in the possibility of commuting other metals into gold; but was very slow to credit any fact that was at all extraordinary. He would tell of Cave's having seen an apparition, without much apparent doubt; and, with more certainty, of his having been himself addressed by the voice of his absent mother. The deception practised by the girl in Cock Lane, who was a ventriloquist, is well known to have wrought on him so successfully, as to make him go and watch in the church, where she pretended the spirit of a young woman to be, which had disclosed to her the manner of its having been violently separated from the body. On this occasion, Boswell endeavours in vain to clear him from the imputation of a weakness, which was but too agreeable to the rest of his character. Yet on Hume's argument against miracles, that it is more probable witnesses should lie or be mistaken than that they should happen, he remarked, as I think, very judiciously, that Hume, taking the proposition simply, is right; but that the Christian revelation is not proved by the miracles alone, but as they are connected with prophecies, and with the doctrines in confirmation of which the miracles were wrought.
He was devout, moral, and humane; frequent and earnest in his petitions for the divine succour, anxious to sublime his nature by disengaging it from worldly soil, and prompt to sympathise with the sorrows, and out of his scanty means, to relieve the necessities of others; but such is the imperfection of man, that his piety was apt to degenerate into superstition; his abstinence yielded to slight temptations, and his charity was often not proof against a discrepancy of opinion either in politics or literature.
Among his friends, Beauclerk seems most to have engaged his love, Langton his respect, and Burke his admiration. The first was conspicuous for wit, liveliness of feelings, and gaiety; the next for rectitude of conduct, piety, and learning; the last for knowledge, sagacity, and eloquence. His praise of Reynolds, that he was the most invulnerable of men, one of whom, if he had a quarrel with him, he should find it the most difficult to say any ill, was praise rather of the negative kind. The younger Warton, he contrived to alienate from him, as is related in the life of that poet. There was, indeed, an entire harmony in their political principles; but questions of literature touch an author yet more sensibly than those of state; and the "idem sentire de republica," was an imperfect bond of amity between men who appreciated so differently the Comus and Lycidas of Milton, and the Bucolics of Theocritus. To Savage and Goldsmith he was attached by similarity of fortunes and pursuits. A yet closer bond of sympathy united him with Collins, as the reader will see in the following extracts from letters which he wrote to Dr. Warton.
How little can we exult in any intellectual powers or literary entertainments, when we see the fate of poor Collins. I knew him a few years ago, full of hopes and full of projects, versed in many languages, high in fancy, and strong in retention. This busy and forcible mind is now under the government of those who lately would not have been able to comprehend the least and most narrow of its designs.—March 8, 1754.
Poor dear Collins. Let me know whether you think it would give him pleasure that I should write to him. I have often been near his state, and therefore have it in great commisseration. * * *
What becomes of poor dear Collins? I wrote him a letter which he never answered. I suppose writing is very troublesome to him. That man is no common loss. The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune, and the transitoriness of beauty; but it is yet more dreadful to consider that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that understanding may make its appearance, and depart, that it may blaze and expire.—April 15, 1756.[14]
Difference of opinion respecting the American war did not separate him from Burke and Fox; and when the nation was afterwards divided by the struggle between the court and populace on one side and the aristocracy on the other, though his principles determined him to that party in which he found the person though perhaps not the interests of his sovereign, yet his affections continued with the great leader in the House of Commons, who was opposed to it. "I am," said he, "for the King against Fox; but I am for Fox against Pitt. The King is my master; but I do not know Pitt; and Fox is my friend;" and to Burke, when he was a candidate for a seat in the new Parliament, he wished, as he told him with a smile, "all the success that an honest man could wish him." Even towards Wilkes his asperity was softened down into good humour by their meeting together over a plentiful table at the house of Dilly the bookseller.
When he had offended any by contradiction or rudeness, it was seldom long before he sought to be reconciled and forgiven. But though his private enmities were easily appeased, yet where he considered the cause of truth to be concerned, his resentment was vehement and unrelenting. That imposture, particularly, which he with good reason supposed Macpherson to have practised on the world with respect to the poems of Ossian, provoked him to vengeance, such as the occasion seemed hardly to demand.