[1199] I have looked in vain into De Bure, Meerman, Mattaire, and other typographical books, for the two editions of the Catholicon, which Dr. Johnson mentions here, with names which I cannot make out. I read 'one by Latinius, one by Boedinus.' I have deposited the original MS. in the British Museum, where the curious may see it. My grateful acknowledgements are due to Mr. Planta for the trouble he was pleased to take in aiding my researches. BOSWELL. A Mr. Planta is mentioned in Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, v. 39.
[1200] Friar Wilkes visited Johnson in May 1776. Piozzi Letters, i. 336. On Sept. 18, 1777, Mrs. Thrale wrote to Johnson:—'I have got some news that will please you now. Here is an agreeable friend come from Paris, whom you were very fond of when we were there—the Prior of our English Benedictine Convent, Mr. Cowley … He inquires much for you; and says Wilkes is very well, No. 45, as they call him in the Convent. A cell is always kept ready for your use he tells me.' Ib p. 373.
[1201] The writing is so bad here, that the names of several of the animals could not be decyphered without much more acquaintance with natural history than I possess.—Dr. Blagden, with his usual politeness, most obligingly examined the MS. To that gentleman, and to Dr. Gray, of the British Museum, who also very readily assisted me, I beg leave to express my best thanks. BOSWELL
[1202] It is thus written by Johnson, from the French pronunciation of fossane. It should be observed, that the person who shewed this Menagerie was mistaken in supposing the fossane and the Brasilian weasel to be the same, the fossane being a different animal, and a native of Madagascar. I find them, however, upon one plate in Pennant's Synopsis of Quadrupeds. BOSWELL.
[1203] How little Johnson relished this talk is shewn by his letter to Mrs. Thrale of May 1, 1780, and by her answer. He wrote:—'The Exhibition, how will you do, either to see or not to see? The Exhibition is eminently splendid. There is contour, and keeping, and grace, and expression, and all the varieties of artificial excellence.' Piozzi Letters, ii. III. She answered:—'When did I ever plague about contour, and grace, and expression? I have dreaded them all three since that hapless day at Compiegne when you teased me so.' Ib p. 116
[1204] 'Nef, (old French from nave) the body of a church.' Johnson's Dictionary.
[1205] My worthy and ingenious friend, Mr. Andrew Lumisden, by his accurate acquaintance with France, enabled me to make out many proper names, which Dr. Johnson had written indistinctly, and sometimes spelt erroneously. Boswell. Lumisden is mentioned in Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 13.
[1206] Baretti, in a marginal note on Piozzi Letters, i. 142, says that 'Johnson saw next to nothing of Paris.' On p. 159 he adds:—'He noticed the country so little that he scarcely spoke of it ever after.' He shews, however, his ignorance of Johnson's doings by saying that 'in France he never touched a pen.'
[1207] Hume's reception in 1763 was very different. He wrote to Adam Smith:—'I have been three days at Paris, and two at Fontainebleau, and have everywhere met with the most extraordinary honours which the most exorbitant vanity could wish or desire.' The Dauphin's three children, afterwards Lewis XVI, Lewis XVIII, and Charles X, had each to make a set speech of congratulation. He was the favourite of the most exclusive coteries. J.H. Burton's Hume, ii. 168, 177, 208. But at that date, sceptical philosophy was the rage.
[1208] Horace Walpole wrote from Paris in 1771 (Letters, v. 317-19):—'The distress here is incredible, especially at Court…. The middling and common people are not much richer than Job when he had lost everything but his patience.' Rousseau wrote of the French in 1777:—'Cette nation qui se prétend si gaie montre peu cette gaité dans ses jeux. Souvent j'allais jadis aux guinguettes pour y voir danser le menu peuple; mais ses danses étaient si maussades, son maintien si dolent, si gauche, que j'en sortais plutot contristé que réjoui.' Les Réveries, IXme. promenade. Baretti (Journey to Genoa, iv. 146) denies that the French 'are entitled to the appellation of cheerful.' 'Provence,' he says (ib. 148), 'is the only province in which you see with some sort of frequency the rustic assemblies roused up to cheerfulness by the fifre and the tambourin.' Mrs. Piozzi describes the absence of 'the happy middle state' abroad. 'As soon as Dover is left behind, every man seems to belong to some other man, and no man to himself.' Piozzi's Journey, ii. 341. Voltaire, in his review of Julia Mandeville (Works, xliii. 364), says:—'Pour peu qu'un roman, une tragédie, une comédie ait de succès a Londres, on en fait trois et quatre éditions en peu de mois; c'est que l'état mitoyen est plus riche et plus instruit en Angleterre qu'en France, &c.' But Barry, the painter (post, May 17, 1783), in 1766, described to Burke, 'the crowds of busy contented people which cover (as one may say) the whole face of the country.' But he was an Irishman comparing France with Ireland. 'They make a strong, but melancholy contrast to a miserable ——— which I cannot help thinking of sometimes. You will not be at any loss to know that I mean Ireland.' Barry's Works, i. 57. 'Hume,' says Dr. J. H. Burton, 'in his Essay on The Parties of Great Britain (published in 1741), alludes to the absence of a middle class in Scotland, where he says, there are only "two ranks of men, gentlemen who have some fortune and education, and the meanest starving poor; without any considerable number of the middling rank of men, which abounds more in England, both in cities and in the country, than in any other quarter of the world."' Life of Hume, i. 198. I do not find this passage in the edition of Hume's Essays of 1770.