[699] Even Hume had no higher notion of what was required in a writer of ancient history. He wrote to Robertson, who was, it seems, meditating a History of Greece:—'What can you do in most places with these (the ancient) authors but transcribe and translate them? No letters or state papers from which you could correct their errors, or authenticate their narration, or supply their defects.' J.H. Burton's Hume, ii. 83.
[700] See ante, ii. 53. Southey, asserting that Robertson had never read the Laws of Alonso the Wise, says, that 'it is one of the thousand and one omissions for which he ought to be called rogue as long as his volumes last.' Southey's Life, ii. 318.
[701] Ovid. de Art. Amand. i. iii. v. 13 [339]. BOSWELL. 'It may be that our name too will mingle with those.'
[702] The Gent. Mag. for Jan. 1766 (p. 45) records, that 'a person was observed discharging musket-balls from a steel crossbow at the two remaining heads upon Temple Bar.' They were the heads of Scotch rebels executed in 1746. Samuel Rogers, who died at the end of 1855, said, 'I well remember one of the heads of the rebels upon a pole at Temple Bar.' Rogers's Table-Talk, p. 2.
[703] In allusion to Dr. Johnson's supposed political principles, and perhaps his own. BOSWELL.
[704] 'Dr. Johnson one day took Bishop Percy's little daughter upon his knee, and asked her what she thought of Pilgrim's Progress. The child answered that she had not read it. "No!" replied the Doctor; "then I would not give one farthing for you:" and he set her down and took no further notice of her.' Croker's Boswell, p. 838. Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 281) says, that Johnson once asked, 'Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and The Pilgrim's Progress?'
[705] It was Johnson himself who was thus honoured. Post, under Dec. 20, 1784.
[706] Here is another instance of his high admiration of Milton as a Poet, notwithstanding his just abhorrence of that sour Republican's political principles. His candour and discrimination are equally conspicuous. Let us hear no more of his 'injustice to Milton.' BOSWELL.
[707] There was an exception to this. In his criticism of Paradise Lost (Works, vii. 136), he says:—'The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of the war of Heaven fills it with incongruity; and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased.'
[708] In the Academy, xxii. 348, 364, 382, Mr. C. E. Doble shews strong grounds for the belief that the author was Richard Allestree, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford, and Provost of Eton. Cowper spoke of it as 'that repository of self-righteousness and pharisaical lumber;' with which opinion Southey wholly disagreed. Southey's Cowper, i. 116.