After proposing to offer, in a future letter, a few corrections and amendments, the first epistle thus concludes:
“In a statue from the hand of Phidias, I would not, if I could help it, have a single toe-nail amiss. And since the smallest speck is seen on snow, I am persuaded that the Knight himself will not be displeased with a freedom which proceeds solely from esteem.”
The second letter is still more pregnant with the truest humour. It is to be remembered that Porson was himself an Etonian; Sir John’s book had been attacked in the Microcosm, a periodical work, by the upper boys at Eton, which fact is thus mentioned by Porson:
“Soon after the publication of Sir John’s book, a parcel of Eton boys, not having the fear of God before their eyes, &c. instead of playing truant, robbing orchards, annoying poultry, or performing any other part of their school exercises, fell foul, in print, upon his Worship’s censure of Addison’s middling style; and even sneered at the story of the Quaker, which I hold to be as good a thing as any in the volume. But what can you expect, as Lord Kaimes justly observes, from a school, where boys are taught to rob on the highway?”
It is with genuine humour that Mister Sundry Whereof affects to doubt the genuineness of some pages in Sir John’s book. “The Knight’s style,” he observes, “is clear and elegant, whilst that in which the circumstance is narrated of Dr. Johnson’s parchment-covered book, is cloudy, inconsistent, and embarrassed. He therefore begs to propose a few queries, of which the first is,
“Would a writer confessedly so exact in his choice of words, as the Knight, talk in this manner: ‘While he was preparing;’ ‘An accident happened?’ As if one should say of that unfortunate divine Dr. Dodd, an accident proved fatal to him; he happened to write another man’s name, &c.”—The whole of this epistle is full of the happiest irony.
The point and humour of the third and concluding epistle is of a similar character. After premising certain canons of criticism, in which it is assumed, that “Whenever Sir John Hawkins, in quoting any part of Johnson’s works, adopts a reading different from the editions, it is to be replaced in the text, and the other discarded. Thus, in the vulgar edition of London, vol. xi. of Johnson’s Works, p. 319, we read,
‘And fixed on Cambria’s solitary shore,’
How much better is Sir John’s reading,
‘And fixed in Cambria’s solitary shore!’