'The solemn fop, significant and budge;
A fool with judges, amongst fools a judge.'
Cowper's Poems, Conversation, 1. 299.
According to Rebecca Warner (Original Letters, p. 204), Johnson telling Joseph Fowke about his refusal to dedicate his Dictionary to Chesterfield, said: 'Sir, I found I must have gilded a rotten post.'
[780] That collection of letters cannot be vindicated from the serious charge of encouraging, in some passages, one of the vices most destructive to the good order and comfort of society, which his Lordship represents as mere fashionable gallantry; and, in others, of inculcating the base practice of dissimulation, and recommending, with disproportionate anxiety, a perpetual attention to external elegance of manners. But it must, at the same time, be allowed, that they contain many good precepts of conduct, and much genuine information upon life and manners, very happily expressed; and that there was considerable merit in paying so much attention to the improvement of one who was dependent upon his Lordship's protection; it has, probably, been exceeded in no instance by the most exemplary parent; and though I can by no means approve of confounding the distinction between lawful and illicit offspring, which is, in effect, insulting the civil establishment of our country, to look no higher; I cannot help thinking it laudable to be kindly attentive to those, of whose existence we have, in any way, been the cause. Mr. Stanhope's character has been unjustly represented as diametrically opposite to what Lord Chesterfield wished him to be. He has been called dull, gross, and awkward; but I knew him at Dresden, when he was Envoy to that court; and though he could not boast of the graces, he was, in truth, a sensible, civil, well-behaved man. BOSWELL. See post, March 28, 1775, under April, 29, 1776, and June 27, 1784.
[781] Chesterfield's Letters, iii. 129.
[782] Now one of his Majesty's principal Secretaries of State. BOSWELL. Afterwards Viscount Melville.
[783] Probably George, second Earl of Macclesfield, who was, in 1752, elected President of the Royal Society. CROKER. Horace Walpole (Letters, ii. 321) mentions him as 'engaged to a party for finding out the longitude.'
[784] In another work (Dr. Johnson: His Friends and his Critics, p. 214), I have shewn that Lord Chesterfield's 'Respectable Hottentot' was not Johnson. From the beginning of 1748 to the end of 1754 Chesterfield had no dealings of any kind with Johnson. At no time had there been the slightest intimacy between the great nobleman and the poor author. Chesterfield had never seen Johnson eat. The letter in which the character is drawn opens with the epigram:
Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare,
Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.
Chesterfield goes on to show 'how it is possible not to love anybody, and yet not to know the reason why…. How often,' he says, 'have I, in the course of my life, found myself in this situation with regard to many of my acquaintance whom I have honoured and respected, without being able to love.' He then instances the case of the man whom he describes as a respectable Hottentot. It is clear that he is writing of a man whom he knows well and who has some claim upon his affection. Twice he says that it is impossible to love him. The date of this letter is Feb. 28, 1751, more than three years after Johnson had for the last time waited in Chesterfield's outward rooms. Moreover the same man is described in three other letters (Sept. 22, 1749; Nov. 1749; and May 27, 1753), and described as one with whom Chesterfield lived on terms of intimacy. In the two former of these letters he is called Mr. L. Lyttelton did not become Sir George Lyttelton till Sept. 14, 1751. He was raised to the peerage in 1757. Horace Walpole (Reign of George III, i. 256) says of him:—'His ignorance of mankind, want of judgment, with strange absence and awkwardness, involved him in mistakes and ridicule.' Had Chesterfield's letter been published when it was written, no one in all likelihood would have so much as dreamt that Johnson was aimed at. But it did not come before the world till twenty-three years later, when Johnson's quarrel with Chesterfield was known to every one, when Johnson himself was at the very head of the literary world, and when his peculiarities had become a matter of general interest.