[76] "Adams.—But, Sir, how can you do this in three years? Johnson.—Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. Adams.—But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary. Johnson.—Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman."—Boswell's "Johnson." Date of 1748.—Ed.
[77] I have not dared to disregard Boswell's request. His orthography is retained.—Ed.
[78] "The rational pride of an author may be offended, rather than flattered, by vague, indiscriminate praise; but he cannot, he should not, be indifferent to the fair testimonies of private and public esteem. Even his moral sympathy may be gratified by the idea, that now, in the present hour, he is imparting some degree of amusement or knowledge to his friends in a distant land; that one day his mind will be familiar to the grand-children of those who are yet unborn."—"Memoirs of my Life and Writings," by Edward Gibbon, vol. i., p. 273.
"Do thou teach me not only to foresee but to enjoy, nay even to feed on future praise. Comfort me by the solemn assurance, that when the little parlour in which I sit at this moment shall be reduced to a worse-furnished box, I shall be read with honour by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see."—"Tom Jones," book xiii., chap. I. Quoted by Gibbon, or his Editor.—Ed.
[79] I have not thought it needful to reprint this letter.—Ed.
[80] Boswell had left England, on August 6th, 1763, for the University of Utrecht, whither his father had sent him to study civil law. On his return to Scotland, he was to put on the gown as a member of the Faculty of Advocates. "Honest man!" he writes of his father to his friend Temple, "he is now very happy; it is amazing to think how much he has had at heart my pursuing the road of civil life." Boswell had once hoped to enter the Guards. A few days later on he wrote: "My father has allowed me £60 a quarter; that is not a great allowance, but with economy I may live very well upon it, for Holland is a cheap country. However I am determined not to be straightened, nor to encourage the least narrowness of disposition as to saving money, but will draw upon my father for any sums I find necessary." He did not give many months to his legal studies at Utrecht. In the following year he set out on his travels. He went through Germany and Switzerland to Italy. It was in the autumn of 1765 that he visited Corsica. He returned to England through France, and arrived in London in February, 1766.
[81] Rousseau came to England in January, 1766. He had not been here long before he quarrelled with Hume, who had been to him so true a friend.—Ed.
[82] George, tenth Earl Marischal. He had taken part in the Jacobite rising of 1715. Later on he held high office in the Prussian service. In 1759 his attainder was reversed, but he continued to live abroad. In one of his letters to Madame de Boufflers he says, in speaking of Rousseau, "Je lui avais fait un projet; mais en le disant un château en Espagne, d'aller habiter une maison toute meublée que j'ai en Ecosse; d'engager le bon David Hume de vivre avec nous."—"Hume's Private Correspondence," page 43.—Ed.
[83] See [page 222].
[84] In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for 1750 (vol. xx., p. 42), we read, "The Phœnix, Captain Carberry, of Bristol, was taken on Christmas eve by an Algerine corsair off the rock of Lisbon, on pretence that his pass was not good, and ordered for Algiers with an officer and six other Turks; but in the passage Captain Carberry with three English sailors and a boy recovered the vessel, after flinging the Turkish officer and two other Turks overboard, and brought it with the Turkish sailors prisoners to Bristol." In the same year the English consul at Algiers wrote to say that some Algerine Corsairs had taken five English vessels because their passes were not good. The consul had complained to the Dey, "who said that he would give such orders that nothing of this sort should happen again, and then swore by his prophet that if any one controverted those orders he would take his head." The Dey had also seized a packet-boat of the British Crown. Commodore Keppel was sent to demand restitution. The Dey replied, "We are disposed to give full satisfaction to the King and the British nation for anything that may happen amiss hereafter; but as to what is past, if they have had any cause to complain, they must think no more of it, and bury it in oblivion." The packet-boat, he maintained, had not a proper Algerine pass, and therefore had been lawfully seized. By a treaty made with the Dey in the following year, the Commodore "settled all differences by waiving the restitution of the money and effects taken from on board the packet-boat on condition that his Majesty's packet-boats shall never be obliged to carry Algerine passports," &c. Whatever protection the English vessels may have had the Turkish corsairs continued to plunder the ships of most other nations. In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for 1785, (vol. lv., p. 830) we read, "The Algerines still continue their piracies in the Mediterranean. They even extend their captures to the Atlantic Ocean, and have struck the American traders with terror."—Ed.