[58] See J.H. Burton's Hume, i. 174, for an account of him.
[59] Lord Macartney, who with his other distinguished qualities, is remarkable also for an elegant pleasantry, told me, that he met Johnson at Lady Craven's, and that he seemed jealous of any interference: 'So, (said his Lordship, smiling,) I kept back.' BOSWELL.
[60] See ante, i. 242.
[61] There is an account of him in Sir John Hawkins's Life of Johnson. BOSWELL. Hawkins (Life, p. 246) records the following sarcasm of Ballow. In a coffee-house he attacked the profession of physic, which Akenside, who was a physician as well as poet, defended. 'Doctor,' said Ballow, 'after all you have said, my opinion of the profession of physic is this. The ancients endeavoured to make it a science, and failed; and the moderns to make it a trade, and have succeeded.'
[62] See ante, i. 274.
[63] I have in vain endeavoured to find out what parts Johnson wrote for Dr. James. Perhaps medical men may. BOSWELL. See ante, i. 159. Johnson, needing medicine at Montrose, 'wrote the prescription in technical characters.' Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 21, 1773.
[64] Horace Walpole, writing of May in this year, says that General Smith, an adventurer from the East Indies, who was taken off by Foote in The Nabob, 'being excluded from the fashionable club of young men of quality at Almack's, had, with a set of sharpers, formed a plan for a new club, which, by the excess of play, should draw all the young extravagants thither. They built a magnificent house in St. James's-street, and furnished it gorgeously.' Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 39.
[65] He said the same when in Scotland. Boswell's Hebrides, under Nov. 22, 1773. On the other hand, in The Rambler, No. 80, he wrote:—'It is scarcely possible to pass an hour in honest conversation, without being able, when we rise from it, to please ourselves with having given or received some advantages; but a man may shuffle cards, or rattle dice, from noon to midnight, without tracing any new idea in his mind, or being able to recollect the day by any other token than his gain or loss, and a confused remembrance of agitated passions, and clamorous altercations.'
[66] 'Few reflect,' says Warburton, 'on what a great wit has so ingenuously owned. That wit is generally false reasoning.' The wit was Wycherley. See his letter xvi. to Pope in Pope's Works. Warburton's Divine Legation, i. xii.
[67] 'Perhaps no man was ever more happy than Dr. Johnson in the extempore and masterly defence of any cause which, at the given moment, he chose to defend.' Stockdale's Memoirs, i. 261.