[654] See ante, i. 399.
[655] 'Sir' said Edwards to Johnson (post, April 17, 1778), 'I remember you would not let us say prodigious at College.'
[656] 'Emigration was at this time a common topick of discourse. Dr. Johnson regretted it as hurtful to human happiness.' Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 15, 1773.
[657] In 1766 Johnson wrote a paper (first published in 1808) to prove that 'the bounty upon corn has produced plenty.' 'The truth of these principles,' he says, 'our ancestors discovered by reason, and the French have now found it by experience. In this regulation we have the honour of being masters to those who, in commercial policy, have been long accounted the masters of the world.' Works, v. 323, 326, and ante, i. 518. 'In 1688 was granted the parliamentary bounty upon the exportation of corn. The country gentlemen had felt that the money price of corn was falling. The bounty was an expedient to raise it artificially to the high price at which it had frequently been sold in the times of Charles I. and II.' Smith's Wealth of Nations, book I. c. xi. The year 1792, the last year of peace before the great war, was likewise the last year of exportation. Penny Cyclo. viii. 22.
[658]
'Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat
To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.'
Goldsmith's Retaliation.
Horace Walpole says of Lord Mansfield's speech on the Habeas Corpus Bill of 1758:—'Perhaps it was the only speech that in my time at least had real effect; that is, convinced many persons.' Reign of George II, iii. 120.
[659] Gibbon, who was now a member of parliament, was present at this dinner. In his Autobiography (Misc. Works, i. 221) he says:—'After a fleeting illusive hope, prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute…. Timidity was fortified by pride, and even the success of my pen discouraged the trial of my voice. But I assisted at the debates of a free assembly; I listened to the attack and defence of eloquence and reason; I had a near prospect of the character, views, and passions of the first men of the age…. The eight sessions that I sat in parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian.'
[660] Horace, Odes, iii. 24, 46.