“Lest it should be supposed that I have been willing to correct in others an abuse of which I have been guilty myself, I beg leave to declare, that, in all my life, I never wrote or dictated a single paragraph, letter, or essay in a newspaper, except a few moral essays under the character of a Chinese, about ten years ago, in the ‘Ledger,’ and a letter, to which I signed my name in the ‘St. James’ Chronicle.’ If the liberty of the press, therefore, has been abused, I have had no hand in it.
“I have always considered the press as the protector of our freedom, as a watchful guardian, capable of uniting the weak against the encroachments of power. What concerns the public most properly admits of a public discussion. But, of late, the press has turned from defending public interest to making inroads upon private life; from combating the strong to overwhelming the feeble. No condition is now too obscure for its abuse, and the protector has become the tyrant of the people. In this manner the freedom of the press is beginning to sow the seeds of its own dissolution; the great must oppose it from principle, and the weak from fear; till at last every rank of mankind shall be found to give up its benefits, content with security from insults.
“How to put a stop to this licentiousness, by which all are indiscriminately abused, and by which vice consequently escapes in the general censure, I am unable to tell; all I could wish is that, as the law gives us no protection against the injury, so it should give calumniators no shelter after having provoked correction. The insults which we receive before the public, by being more open, are the more distressing; by treating them with silent contempt we do not pay a sufficient deference to the opinion of the world. By recurring to legal redress we too often expose the weakness of the law, which only serves to increase our mortification by failing to relieve us. In short, every man should singly consider himself as the guardian of the liberty of the press, and, as far as his influence can extend, should endeavor to prevent its licentiousness becoming at last the grave of its freedom.
“OLIVER GOLDSMITH.”
Boswell, who had just arrived in town, met with this article in a newspaper which he found at Dr. Johnson’s. The doctor was from home at the time, and Bozzy and Mrs. Williams, in a critical conference over the letter, determined from the style that it must have been written by the lexicographer himself. The latter on his return soon undeceived them. “Sir,” said he to Boswell, “Goldsmith would no more have asked me to have wrote such a thing as that for him than he would have asked me to feed him with a spoon, or do anything else that denoted his imbecility. Sir, had he shown it to any one friend, he would not have been allowed to publish it. He has, indeed, done it very well; but it is a foolish thing well done. I suppose he has been so much elated with the success of his new comedy that he has thought everything that concerned him must be of importance to the public.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
BOSWELL IN HOLY WEEK—DINNER AT OGLETHORPE’S—DINNER AT PAOLI’S—THE POLICY OF TRUTH—GOLDSMITH AFFECTS INDEPENDENCE OF ROYALTY—PAOLI’S COMPLIMENT—JOHNSON’S EULOGIUM ON THE FIDDLE—QUESTION ABOUT SUICIDE—BOSWELL’S SUBSERVIENCY
The return of Boswell to town to his task of noting down the conversations of Johnson enables us to glean from his journal some scanty notices of Goldsmith. It was now Holy Week, a time during which Johnson was particularly solemn in his manner and strict in his devotions. Boswell, who was the imitator of the great moralist in everything, assumed, of course, an extra devoutness on the present occasion. “He had an odd mock solemnity of tone and manner,” said Miss Burney (afterward Madame D’Arblay), “which he had acquired from constantly thinking, and imitating Dr. Johnson.” It would seem, that he undertook to deal out some secondhand homilies, à la Johnson, for the edification of Goldsmith during Holy Week. The poet, whatever might be his religious feeling, had no disposition to be schooled by so shallow an apostle. “Sir,” said he in reply, “as I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my coat from the tailor, so I take my religion from the priest.”