[131] Johnson was very ill during this visit. Mrs. Thrale had at the same time given birth to a daughter, and had been nursed by her mother. His thoughts, therefore, were turned on illness. Writing to Mrs. Thrale, he says:—'To roll the weak eye of helpless anguish, and see nothing on any side but cold indifference, will, I hope, happen to none whom I love or value; it may tend to withdraw the mind from life, but has no tendency to kindle those affections which fit us for a purer and a nobler state…. These reflections do not grow out of any discontent at C's [Chambers's] behaviour; he has been neither negligent nor troublesome; nor do I love him less for having been ill in his house. This is no small degree of praise.' Piozzi Letters, i. 13.
[132] See ante, ii. 3, note.
[133] The editor of the Letters of Boswell justly says (p. 149):—'The detail in the Life of Johnson is rather scanty about this period; dissipation, the History of Corsica, wife-hunting, … interfered perhaps at this time with Boswell's pursuit of Dr. Johnson.'
[134] See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 15, 1773, for a discussion of the same question. Lord Eldon has recorded (Life, i. 106), that when he first went the Northern Circuit (about 1776-1780), he asked Jack Lee (post, March 20, 1778), who was not scrupulous in his advocacy, whether his method could be justified. 'Oh, yes,' he said, 'undoubtedly. Dr. Johnson had said that counsel were at liberty to state, as the parties themselves would state, what it was most for their interest to state.' After some interval, and when he had had his evening bowl of milk punch and two or three pipes of tobacco, he suddenly said, 'Come, Master Scott, let us go to bed. I have been thinking upon the questions that you asked me, and I am not quite so sure that the conduct you represented will bring a man peace at the last.' Lord Eldon, after stating pretty nearly what Johnson had said, continues:—'But it may be questioned whether even this can be supported.'
[135] Garrick brought out Hugh Kelly's False Delicacy at Drury Lane six days before Goldsmith's Good-Natured Man was brought out at Covent Garden. 'It was the town talk,' says Mr. Forster (Life of Goldsmith, ii. 93), some weeks before either performance took place, 'that the two comedies were to be pitted against each other.' False Delicacy had a great success. Ten thousand copies of it were sold before the season closed. (Ib p. 96.) 'Garrick's prologue to False Delicacy,' writes Murphy (Life of Garrick, p. 287), 'promised a moral and sentimental comedy, and with an air of pleasantry called it a sermon in five acts. The critics considered it in the same light, but the general voice was in favour of the play during a run of near twenty nights. Foote, at last, by a little piece called Piety in Pattens, brought that species of composition into disrepute.' It is recorded in Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 201, that when some one asked Johnson whether they should introduce Hugh Kelly to him, 'No, Sir,' says he, 'I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.' See post, beginning of 1777.
[136] The Provoked Husband, or A Journey to London, by Vanbrugh and Colley Cibber. It was brought out in 1727-8. See post, June 3, 1784.
[137] See ante, i. 213.
[138] April 6, 1772, and April 12, 1776.
[139] Richardson, writing on Dec. 7, 1756, to Miss Fielding, about her Familiar Letters, says:—'What a knowledge of the human heart! Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother's knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours. His was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while yours was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.' Richardson Corres. ii. 104. Mrs. Calderwood, writing of her visit to the Low Countries in 1756, says:—'All Richison's [Richardson's] books are translated, and much admired abroad; but for Fielding's the foreigners have no notion of them, and do not understand them, as the manners are so entirely English.' Letters, &c., of Mrs. Calderwood, p. 208
[140] In The Provoked Husband, act iv. sc. 1.