“Dr. Johnson had a very high opinion of Edmund Burke. He said, ‘That fellow calls forth all my powers;’ and once, when he was out of spirits and rather dejected, he said, ‘Were I to see Burke now ’twould kill me.’”
Mr. Langton.[233]
“Mr. Johnson used to laugh at a passage in Carte’s ‘Life[234] of the Duke of Ormond,’ where he gravely observes ‘that he was always in full dress when he went to court; too many being in the practice of going thither with double lapells.’”
Mr. Langton.
“——, who translated ‘Ariosto,’ had a dispute with Tom Wharton[235] as to some passages of it. —— knew the subject perfectly, but could not express himself. Wharton knew it very superficially, but wrote with ease and vivacity. Johnson said ‘the one had ball without powder, and the other powder without ball.’”
“Johnson had a sovereign contempt for Wilkes and his party, whom he looked upon as a mere rabble. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘had Wilkes’s mob prevailed against Government, this nation had died of phthiriasis.’ Mr. Langton told me this. The expression, Morbus pediculosus, as being better known, would strike more. Lousy disease may be put in a parenthesis.”
“Mr. Ilay Campbell[236] spoke with admirable good sense and ingenuity, but had a very weak voice and a diminutive appearance and manner. I said his pleading was like Giardini’s playing on a child’s fiddle.”
“The extracts of a book given in the review often please us much more than the book itself does. The extracts are embellished and illustrated with criticism. It is like collops well-seasoned and served up with a good sauce, which are better eating than the sirloin or rump from whence they are cut. (Or, thus one eats with greater relish slices or collops well seasoned and served up with a good sauce, than one does the sirloin or rump from whence they are cut).”
“I said the Court of Session was much more quiet and agreeable when President Dundas[237] was absent. ‘When he is there,’ said I, ‘you feel yourself as in a bleachfield with a large dog in it. He is chained and does not bite you. But he barks wowf, wowf, and makes you start; your nerves are hurt by him.’”