[1327] Gibbon (Misc. Works, i. 43) protests against 'the trite and lavish praise of the happiness of our boyish years, which is echoed with so much affectation in the world. That happiness I have never known, that time I have never regretted. The poet may gaily describe the short hours of recreation; but he forgets the daily tedious labours of the school, which is approached each morning with anxious and reluctant steps.' See ante, p. 44, and post, under Feb. 27, 1772.
[1328] About fame Gibbon felt much as Johnson did. 'I am disgusted,' he wrote (ib. 272), 'with the affectation of men of letters, who complain that they have renounced a substance for a shadow, and that their fame (which sometimes is no insupportable weight) affords a poor compensation for envy, censure, and persecution. My own experience, at least, has taught me a very different lesson; twenty happy years have been animated by the labour of my History, and its success has given me a name, a rank, a character, in the world, to which I should not otherwise have been entitled.'
[1329] See ante, p. 432.
[1330] See ante, p. 332.
[1331] This opinion was given by him more at large at a subsequent period. See Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 3rd edit. p. 32 [Aug. 16]. BOSWELL. 'That Swift was its author, though it be universally believed, was never owned by himself, nor very well proved by any evidence; but no other claimant can be produced, and he did not deny it when Archbishop Sharpe and the Duchess of Somerset, by showing it to the Queen, debarred him from a bishoprick.' Johnson's Works, viii. 197. See also post, March 24, 1775. Stockdale records (Memoirs, ii. 61) that Johnson said 'that if Swift really was the author of The Tale of the Tub, as the best of his other performances were of a very inferior merit, he should have hanged himself after he had written it.' Scott (Life of Swift, ed. 1834, p. 77) says:—'Mrs. Whiteway observed the Dean, in the latter years of his life [in 1735], looking over the Tale, when suddenly closing the book he muttered, in an unconscious soliloquy, "Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!" She begged it of him, who made some excuse at the moment; but on her birthday he presented her with it inscribed, "From her affectionate cousin." On observing the inscription, she ventured to say, "I wish, Sir, you had said the gift of the author!" The Dean bowed, smiled good-humouredly, and answered, "No, I thank you," in a very significant manner.' There is this to be said of Johnson's incredulity about the Tale of a Tub, that the History of John Bull and the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, though both by Arbuthnot, were commonly assigned to Swift and are printed in his Works.
[1332] 'Thomson thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet;—the eye that distinguishes in everything presented to its view whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute.' Johnson's Works, viii. 377. See post, ii. 63, and April 11, 1776.
[1333] Burke seems to be meant. See post, April 25, 1778, and Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 15, and Sept. 15, 1773.—It is strange however that, while in these three places Boswell mentions Burke's name, he should leave a blank here. In Boswelliana, p. 328, Boswell records:—'Langton said Burke hammered his wit upon an anvil, and the iron was cold. There were no sparks flashing and flying all about.'
[1334] In Boswelliana (p. 214) this anecdote is thus given:—'Boswell was talking to Mr. Samuel Johnson of Mr. Sheridan's enthusiasm for the advancement of eloquence. "Sir," said Mr. Johnson, "it won't do. He cannot carry through his scheme. He is like a man attempting to stride the English Channel. Sir, the cause bears no proportion to the effect. It is setting up a candle at Whitechapel to give light at Westminster."' See also ante, p. 385, and post. Oct. 16, 1969, April 18 and May 17, 1783.
[1335] Most likely Boswell himself. See ante, p. 410.
[1336] 'Let a Frenchman talk twice with a minister of state, he desires no more to furnish out a volume.' Swift's Works, ed. 1803, xvi. 197. Lord Chesterfield wrote from Paris in 1741:—'They [the Parisians] despise us, and with reason, for our ill-breeding; on the other hand, we despite them for their want of learning, and we are in the right of it.' Supplement to Chesterfield's Letters, p. 49. See Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 14, 1773.