'His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.'
Gray's Elegy.
[543] Johnson, a fortnight or so later, mentions this waterfall in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, after speaking of a pool that Mr. Thrale was having dug. 'He will have no waterfall to roar like the Doctor's. I sat by it yesterday, and read Erasmus's Militis Christiani Enchiridion.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 3.
[544] See post, April 9 and 30, 1778. At the following Easter he recorded: 'My memory is less faithful in retaining names, and, I am afraid, in retaining occurrences.' Pr. and Med. p. 170.
[545] I am told that Horace, Earl of Orford, has a collection of Bon-Mots by persons who never said but one. BOSWELL. Horace Walpole had succeeded to his title after the publication of the first edition of this book.
[546] See Macaulay's Essays, i. 370.
[547] Johnson (Works, vii. 158) tells how 'Rochester lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one and thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay.' He describes how Burnet 'produced a total change both of his manners and opinions,' and says of the book in which this conversion is recounted that it is one 'which the critick ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety.' In Johnson's answer to Boswell we have a play on the title of this work, which is, Some passages of the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester.
[548] In the passages from Johnson's Life of Prior, quoted ante, ii. 78, note 3, may be found an explanation of what he here says. A poet who 'tries to be amorous by dint of study,' and who 'in his amorous pedantry exhibits the college,' may be gross and yet not excite to lewdness. Goldsmith, in 1766, in a book entitled Beauties of English Poetry Selected, had inserted two of Prior's tales, 'which for once interdicted from general reading a book with his name upon its title-page.' Mr. Forster hereupon remarks 'on the changes in the public taste. Nothing is more frequent than these, and few things so sudden.' Of these changes he gives some curious instances. Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 4.
[549] See ante, iii. 5.
[550] See ante, i. 428.