[209] Paoli's father had been one of the leaders of the Corsicans in their revolt against Genoa in 1734. Paoli himself was chosen by them as their General-in-chief in 1755. In 1769 the island was conquered by the French. He escaped in an English ship, and settled in England. Here he stayed till 1789, when Mirabeau moved in the National Assembly the recall of all the Corsican patriots. Paoli was thereupon appointed by Louis XVI. Lieutenant-general and military commandant in Corsica. He resisted the violence of the Convention, and was, in consequence, summoned before it. Refusing to obey, an expedition was sent to arrest him. Napoleon Buonaparte fought in the French army, but Paoli's party proved the stronger. The islanders sought the aid of Great Britain, and offered the crown of Corsica to George III. The offer was accepted, but by an act of incredible folly, not Paoli, but Sir Gilbert Eliot, was made Viceroy. Paoli returned to England, where he died in 1807, at the age of eighty-two. In 1796 Corsica was abandoned by the English. By the Revolution it ceased to be a conquered province, having been formally declared an integral part of France. At the present day the Corsicans are proud of being citizens of that great country; no less proud, however, are they of Pascal Paoli, and of the gallant struggle for independence of their forefathers.
[210] According to the Ann. Reg. (xii. 132) Paoli arrived in London on Sept. 21. He certainly was in London on Oct. 10, for on that day he was presented by Boswell to Johnson. Yet Wesley records in his Journal (iii. 370) on Oct. 13:—'I very narrowly missed meeting the great Pascal Paoli. He landed in the dock [at Portsmouth] but a very few minutes after I left the waterside. Surely He who hath been with him from his youth up hath not sent him into England for nothing.' In the Public Advertiser for Oct. 4 there is the following entry, inserted no doubt by Boswell:—'On Sunday last General Paoli, accompanied by James Boswell, Esq., took an airing in Hyde Park in his coach.' Priors Goldsmith, i. 450. Horace Walpole writes:—'Paoli's character had been so advantageously exaggerated by Mr. Boswell's enthusiastic and entertaining account of him, that the Opposition were ready to incorporate him in the list of popular tribunes. The Court artfully intercepted the project; and deeming patriots of all nations equally corruptible, bestowed a pension of £1000 a year on the unheroic fugitive.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iii. 387.
[211] Johnson, writes Mrs. Piozzi (Anec., p. 228), ridiculed a friend 'who, looking out on Streatham Common from our windows, lamented the enormous wickedness of the times, because some bird-catchers were busy there one fine Sunday morning. "While half the Christian world is permitted," said Johnson, "to dance and sing and celebrate Sunday as a day of festivity, how comes your puritanical spirit so offended with frivolous and empty deviations from exactness? Whoever loads life with unnecessary scruples, Sir," continued he, "provokes the attention of others on his conduct, and incurs the censure of singularity, without reaping the reward of superior virtue."' See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 20, 1773.
[212] The first edition of Hume's History of England was full of Scotticisms, many of which he corrected in subsequent editions. MALONE. According to Mr. J. H. Burton (Life of Hume, ii. 79), 'He appears to have earnestly solicited the aid of Lyttelton, Mallet, and others, whose experience of English composition might enable them to detect Scotticisms.' Mr. Burton gives instances of alterations made in the second edition. He says also that 'in none of his historical or philosophical writings does any expression used by him, unless in those cases where a Scotticism has escaped his vigilance, betray either the district or the county of his origin.' Ib i. 9. Hume was shown in manuscript Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind. Though it was an attack on his own philosophy, yet in reading it 'he kept,' he says, 'a watchful eye all along over the style,' so that he might point out any Scotticisms. Ib ii. 154. Nevertheless, as Dugald Stewart says in his Life of Robertson (p. 214), 'Hume fails frequently both in purity and grammatical correctness.' Even in his later letters I have noticed Scotticisms.
[213] In 1763 Wilkes, as author of The North Briton, No. 45, had been arrested on 'a general warrant directed to four messengers to take up any persons without naming or describing them with any certainty, and to bring them, together with their papers.' Such a warrant as this Chief Justice Pratt (Lord Camden) declared to be 'unconstitutional, illegal, and absolutely void.' Ann. Reg. vi. 145.
[214] See Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 24, 1773.
[215] In the Spring of this year, at a meeting of the electors of Southwark, 'instructions' had been presented to Mr. Thrale and his brother-member, of which the twelfth was:—'That you promote a bill for shortening the duration of Parliaments.' Gent. Mag. xxxix. 162.
[216] This paradox Johnson had exposed twenty-nine years earlier, in his Life of Sir Francis Drake, Works, vi. 366. In Rasselas, chap. xi., he considers also the same question. Imlac is 'inclined to conclude that, if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.' He then enumerates the advantages which civilisation confers on the Europeans. 'They are surely happy,' said the prince, 'who have all these conveniences.' 'The Europeans,' answered Imlac, 'are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.' Writing to Mrs. Thrale from Skye, Johnson said: 'The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf in a cavity between rocks, where a being born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and rain. Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy, but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.' Piozzi Letters, i. 150. See post, April 21 and May 7, 1773, April 26, 1776, and June 15, 1784.
[217] James Burnet, a Scotch Lord of Session, by the title of Lord Monboddo. 'He was a devout believer in the virtues of the heroic ages, and the deterioration of civilised mankind; a great contemner of luxuries, insomuch that he never used a wheel carriage.' WALTER SCOTT, quoted in Croker's Boswell, p. 227. There is some account of him in Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, ii. 175. In his Origin of Language, to which Boswell refers in his next note, after praising Henry Stephen for his Greek Dictionary, he continues:—'But to compile a dictionary of a barbarous language, such as all the modern are compared with the learned, is a work which a man of real genius, rather than undertake, would choose to die of hunger, the most cruel, it is said, of all deaths. I should, however, have praised this labour of Doctor Johnson's more, though of the meanest kind,' &c. Monboddo's Origin of Language, v. 274. On p. 271, he says:—'Dr. Johnson was the most invidious and malignant man I have ever known.' See post, March 21, 1772, May 8, 1773, and Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 21, 1773.
[218] His Lordship having frequently spoken in an abusive manner of Dr. Johnson, in my company, I on one occasion during the life-time of my illustrious friend could not refrain from retaliation, and repeated to him this saying. He has since published I don't know how many pages in one of his curious books, attempting, in much anger, but with pitiful effect, to persuade mankind that my illustrious friend was not the great and good man which they esteemed and ever will esteem him to be. BOSWELL.