The 'contemptible scribbler' was, I believe, John Wolcot, better known by his assumed name of Peter Pindar. He had been a clergyman. In his Epistle to Boswell (Works, i. 219), he says in reference to the passages about Sir A. Macdonald (afterwards Lord Macdonald):—'A letter of severe remonstrance was sent to Mr. B., who, in consequence, omitted in the second edition of his Journal what is so generally pleasing to the public, viz., the scandalous passages relative to that nobleman.' It was in a letter to the Gent. Mag. 1786, p. 285, that Boswell 'publickly disproved the insinuation' made 'in a late scurrilous publication' that these passages 'were omitted in consequence of a letter from his Lordship. Nor was any application,' he continues, 'made to me by the nobleman alluded to at any time to make any alteration in my Journal.'
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'Nothing extenuate Nor set down aught in malice.' |
Othello, act v. sc. 2.
[1153] See ante, i. 189, note 2, 296, 297; and Johnson's Works, v. 23.
[1154] Of his two imitations Boswell means The Vanity of Human Wishes, of which one hundred lines were written in a day. Ante, i. 192, and ii. 15.
[1155] Johnson, it should seem, did not allow that there was any pleasure in writing poetry. 'It has been said there is pleasure in writing, particularly in writing verses. I allow you may have pleasure from writing after it is over, if you have written well; but you don't go willingly to it again.' Ante, iv. 219. What Johnson always sought was to sufficiently occupy the mind. So long as that was done, that labour would, I believe, seem to him the pleasanter which required the less thought.
[1156] Nathan Bailey published his English Dictionary in 1721.
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'Woolston, the scourge of scripture, mark with awe! And mighty Jacob, blunderbuss of law.' |