[1348] 'Mr. Arkwright pronounced Johnson to be the only person who on a first view understood both the principle and powers of machinery.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 215. Arthur Young, who visited Birmingham in 1768, writes:—'I was nowhere more disappointed than at Birmingham, where I could not gain any intelligence even of the most common nature, through the excessive jealousy of the manufacturers. It seems the French have carried off several of their fabricks, and thereby injured the town not a little. This makes them so cautious that they will show strangers scarce anything.' Tour through the North of England, iii. 279.
[1349] Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale (year not given):—'I have passed one day at Birmingham with my old friend Hector—there's a name—and his sister, an old love. My mistress is grown much older than my friend,
—-"O quid habes illius, illius
Quae spirabat amores
Quae me surpuerat mihi."'
'Of her, of her what now remains,
Who breathed the loves, who
charmed the swains,
And snatched me from my heart?'
FRANCIS, Horace, Odes, iv. 13. 18. Piozzi Letters, i. 290.
[1350] Some years later he wrote:—'Mrs. Careless took me under her care, and told me when I had tea enough.' Ib. ii. 205.
[1351] See ante, ii. 362, note 3.
[1352] Johnson, in a letter to Hector, on March 7 of this year, described Congreve as 'very dull, very valetudinary, and very recluse, willing, I am afraid, to forget the world, and content to be forgotten by it, to repose in that sullen sensuality into which men naturally sink who think disease a justification of indulgence, and converse only with those who hope to prosper by indulging them … Infirmity will come, but let us not invite it; indulgence will allure us, but let us turn resolutely away. Time cannot always be defeated, but let us not yield till we are conquered.' Notes and Queries, 6th S., iii. 401.
[1353] In the same letter he said:—'I hope dear Mrs. Careless is well, and now and then does not disdain to mention my name. It is happy when a brother and sister live to pass their time at our age together. I have nobody to whom I can talk of my first years—when I do to Lichfield, I see the old places but find nobody that enjoyed them with me.'
[1354] I went through the house where my illustrious friend was born, with a reverence with which it doubtless will long be visited. An engraved view of it, with the adjacent buildings, is in The Gent. Mag. for Feb. 1875. BOSWELL.