'Your most humble servant,
'SAM. JOHNSON.'
If Johnson went to Oxford his stay there was brief, as on April 27
Boswell found him at home.
[692] 'There are,' says Johnson, speaking of Dryden (Works, vii. 292), 'men whose powers operate only at leisure and in retirement, and whose intellectual vigour deserts them in conversation.' See also ante, i. 413. 'No man,' he said of Goldsmith, 'was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had;' post, 1780, in Mr. Langton's Collection. Horace Walpole (Letters, viii. 560), who 'knew Hume personally and well,' said, 'Mr. Hume's writings were so superior to his conversation, that I frequently said he understood nothing till he had written upon it.'
[693] The age of great English historians had not long begun. The first volume of The Decline and Fall was published three years later. Addison had written in 1716 (Freeholder, No. 35), 'Our country, which has produced writers of the first figure in every other kind of work, has been very barren in good historians.' Johnson, in 1751, repeated this observation in The Rambler, No. 122. Lord Bolingbroke wrote in 1735 (Works, iii. 454), 'Our nation has furnished as ample and as important matter, good and bad, for history, as any nation under the sun; and yet we must yield the palm in writing history most certainly to the Italians and to the French, and I fear even to the Germans.'
[694] Gibbon, informing Robertson on March 26, 1788, of the completion of The Decline and Fall, said:—'The praise which has ever been the most flattering to my ear, is to find my name associated with the names of Robertson and Hume; and provided I can maintain my place in the triumvirate, I am indifferent at what distance I am ranked below my companions and masters.' Dugald Stewart's Robertson, p. 367.
[695] 'Sir,' said Johnson, 'if Robertson's style be faulty, he owes it me; that is, having too many words, and those too big ones.' Post, Sept. 19, 1777. Johnson was not singular among the men of his time in condemning Robertson's verbiage. Wesley (Journal, iii. 447) wrote of vol. i. of Charles the Fifth:—'Here is a quarto volume of eight or ten shillings' price, containing dry, verbose dissertations on feudal government, the substance of all which might be comprised in half a sheet of paper!' Johnson again uses verbiage (a word not given in his Dictionary), post, April 9, 1778.
[696] See ante, ii. 210.
[697] See post, Oct. 10, 1779.
[698] 'Vertot, né en Normandie en 1655. Historien agréable et élégant. Mort en 1735.' Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV.