[1313] Horace Walpole (Letters, iii. 135) says:—'You know how decent, humble, inoffensive a creature Dodsley is; how little apt to forget or disguise his having been a footman.' Johnson seems to refer to Dodsley in the following passage, written in 1756 (Works, v. 358):—'The last century imagined that a man composing in his chariot was a new object of curiosity; but how much would the wonder have been increased by a footman studying behind it.'
[1314] See ante, i. 417.
[1315] Yet surely it is a very useful work, and of wonderful research and labour for one man to have executed. BOSWELL. See Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 17, 1773.
[1316] Two days earlier, Hume congratulated Gibbon on the first volume of his Decline and Fall:—'I own that if I had not previously had the happiness of your personal acquaintance, such a performance from an Englishman in our age would have given me some surprise. You may smile at this sentiment, but as it seems to me that your countrymen, for almost a whole generation, have given themselves up to barbarous and absurd faction, and have totally neglected all polite letters, I no longer expected any valuable production ever to come from them.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 484.
[1317] Five weeks later Boswell used a different metaphor. 'I think it is right that as fast as infidel wasps or venomous insects, whether creeping or flying, are hatched, they should be crushed.' Letters of Boswell, p. 232. If the infidels were wasps to the orthodox, the orthodox were hornets to the infidels. Gibbon wrote (Misc. Works, i. 273):—'The freedom of my writings has indeed provoked an implacable tribe; but as I was safe from the stings, I was soon accustomed to the buzzing of the hornets.'
[1318] Macaulay thus examines this report (Essays, i. 360):—'To what then, it has been asked, could Johnson allude? Possibly to some anecdote or some conversation of which all trace is lost. One conjecture may be offered, though with diffidence. Gibbon tells us in his memoirs [Misc. Works, i. 56] that at Oxford he took a fancy for studying Arabic, and was prevented from doing so by the remonstrances of his tutor. Soon after this, the young man fell in with Bossuet's controversial writings, and was speedily converted by them to the Roman Catholic faith. The apostasy of a gentleman-commoner would of course be for a time the chief subject of conversation in the common room of Magdalene. His whim about Arabic learning would naturally be mentioned, and would give occasion to some jokes about the probability of his turning Mussulman. If such jokes were made, Johnson, who frequently visited Oxford, was very likely to hear of them.' Though Gibbon's Autobiography ends with the year 1788, yet he wrote portions of it, I believe, after the publication of the Life of Johnson. (See ante, ii. 8, note 1.) I have little doubt that in the following lines he refers to the attack thus made on him by Boswell and Johnson. 'Many years afterwards, when the name of Gibbon was become as notorious as that of Middleton, it was industriously whispered at Oxford that the historian had formerly "turned Papist;" my character stood exposed to the reproach of inconstancy.' Gibbon's Misc. Works, i. 65.
[1319] Steele, in his Apology for Himself and his Writings (ed. 1714, p. 80), says of himself:—'He first became an author when an ensign of the Guards, a way of life exposed to much irregularity, and being thoroughly convinced of many things of which he often repented, and which he more often repeated, he writ, for his own private use, a little book called the Christian Hero, with a design principally to fix upon his own mind a strong impression of virtue and religion, in opposition to a stronger propensity towards unwarrantable pleasures. This secret admonition was too weak; he therefore printed the book with his name, in hopes that a standing testimony against himself, and the eyes of the world, that is to say of his acquaintance, upon him in a new light, might curb his desires, and make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was virtuous, and living so quite contrary a life.'
[1320] 'A man,' no doubt, is Boswell himself.
[1321] '"I was sure when I read it that the preface to Baretti's Dialogues was Dr. Johnson's; and that I made him confess." "Baretti's Dialogues! What are they about?" "A thimble, and a spoon, and a knife, and a fork! They are the most absurd, and yet the most laughable things you ever saw. They were written for Miss Thrale, and all the dialogues are between her and him, except now and then a shovel and a poker, or a goose and a chair happen to step in."' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, ii. 263.
[1322] 'April 4, 1760. At present nothing is talked of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and tedious performance; it is a kind of novel called The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; the great humour of which consists in the whole narration always going backwards.' Walpole's Letters, iii. 298. 'March 7, 1761. The second and third volumes of Tristram Shandy, the dregs of nonsense, have universally met the contempt they deserve.' Ib 382. '"My good friend," said Dr. Farmer (ante, i. 368), one day in the parlour at Emanuel College, "you young men seem very fond of this Tristram Shandy; but mark my words, however much it may be talked about at present, yet, depend upon it, in the course of twenty years, should any one wish to refer to it, he will be obliged to go to an antiquary to inquire for it."' Croker's Boswell, ed. 1844, ii. 339. See ante, ii. 173, note 2, and 222.