'Condition, circumstance, is not the thing;
Bliss is the same in subject or in King.'
See also post, April 15, 1778.
[23] In Boswelliana, p. 220, a brief account is given of his life, which was not altogether uneventful.
[24] We may compare with this what he says in The Rambler, No. 21, about the 'cowardice which always encroaches fast upon such as spend their time in the company of persons higher than themselves.' In No. 104 he writes:—'It is dangerous for mean minds to venture themselves within the sphere of greatness.' In the court that Boswell many years later paid to Lord Lonsdale, he suffered all the humiliations that the brutality of this petty greatness can inflict. Letters of Boswell, p. 324. See also post, Sept. 22, 1777.
[25] See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 19, 1773.
[26] Johnson (Works, ix. 107) thus sums up his examination of second-sight:—'There is against it, the seeming analogy of things confusedly seen, and little understood; and for it, the indistinct cry of natural persuasion, which may be, perhaps, resolved at last into prejudice and tradition. I never could advance my curiosity to conviction; but came away at last only willing to believe.' See also post, March 24, 1775. Hume said of the evidence in favour of second-sight—:'As finite added to finite never approaches a hair's breadth nearer to infinite, so a fact incredible in itself acquires not the smallest accession of probability by the accumulation of testimony.' J. H. Burton's Hume, i. 480.
[27] 'I love anecdotes,' said Johnson. Boswell's Hebridge, Aug. 16, 1773. Boswell said that 'Johnson always condemned the word anecdotes, as used in the sense that the French, and we from them, use it, as signifying particulars.' Letters of Boswell, p. 311. In his Dictionary, he defined 'Anecdotes Something yet unpublished; secret history.' In the fourth edition he added: 'It is now used, after the French, for a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life.'
[28] See ante, July 19, 1763.
[29] Boswell, writing to Wilkes in 1776, said:—'Though we differ widely in religion and politics, il y a des points ou nos ames sont animes, as Rouseau said to me in his wild retreat.' Almon's Wilkes, iv. 319.
[30] Rousseau fled from France in 1762. A few days later his arrest was ordered at Geneva. He fled from Neufchatel in 1763, and soon afterwards he was banished from Berne. Nonev. Biog. Gen., Xlii. 750. He had come to England with David Hume a few weeks before this conversation was held, and was at this time in Chiswick. Hume's Private Corres., pp. 125, 145.