[70]. The river wanders at its own sweet will.—Wordsworth.
[71]. The lady, we here see, gives up the argument, but keeps her mind.
[72]. See the Examiner, Feb. 9.
[73]. ‘I hated my profession’ (the business of a shoemaker, to which he was bound prentice) ‘with a perfect hatred.’ See Mr. Gifford’s Life of Himself prefixed to his Juvenal. He seems to have liked few things else better from that day to this. He tells us in the same work (though this is hardly what I should call being ‘a good hater’) that he did not much like his father, and was not sorry when he died. This candid and amiable personage always overflowed with ‘the milk of human kindness.’
[74]. ‘Undoubtedly the translator of Juvenal.’
[75]. ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Mr. Gifford here seems to exclude his band of gentlemen-pensioners, whom he pays on earth, from bursting with obscure worth into the realms of day. It is thus that Jacobin sentiments sprout from the commonest sympathy, and are even unavoidable in a government critic, when the common claims of humanity touch his pity or his self-love.
[76]. A quotation of Mr. Gifford’s from Shakespeare. Yet he reproaches me with quoting from Shakespeare.
[77]. To Apollo.
[78]. Humanity stands as little in this author’s way as truth when his object is to please. It was in the same spirit of unmanly adulation that he struck at Mrs. Robinson’s lameness and ‘her crutches,’ with a hand, that ought to have been withered in the attempt by the lightning of public indignation and universal scorn. Mr. Sheridan once spoke of certain politicians in his day who ‘skulked behind the throne, and made use of the sceptre as a conductor to carry off the lightning of national indignation which threatened to consume them.’ There are certain small critics and poetasters who have always been trying to do the same thing.
[79]. This word is not very choice English: the character is not English.