7. long as books last: Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), lawyer, statesman, philosopher and essayist. The quotation is taken from the ‘Dedication’ to the Essays, although there Bacon’s confidence in the Essays’ longevity seems to be based more on the fact of their existing in a Latin version (‘being in the universal language’) than on the perennial human centrality of their subject matter.
No. 108. Saturday, 30 March 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. ii. 40–43.
2. COWLEY: Abraham Cowley (1618–67), poet.
3. accommodation of man: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, v. 200–9.
4. Erasmus: Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), humanist, scholar and man of letters.
5. without regard to literature: Erasmus, μωρίας ενκομιον [The Praise of Folly] (Basel, 1515), sig. aiv.
6. time was his estate: This was said of Girolamo Cardano (1501–76), Italian philosopher, doctor and mathematician.
No. 113. Tuesday, 16 April 1751.
1. JUVENAL: Juvenal, vi. 28–9.
2. Horace: ‘Hic murus aeneus esto, / nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa’ (Horace, Epistles, I. i. 60–61); ‘may this be to us as a wall of bronze – to have no uneasy conscience, no sense of guilt to make us blanch’.
3. another letter: Rambler No. 115.
No. 114. Saturday, 20 April 1751.
1. Juv: Juvenal, vi. 220–21.
2. in his hands: Juvenal, x. 96–7.
3. Boerhaave: Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), Dutch physician and professor of medicine. Cf. Johnson’s ‘Life of Boerhaave’, Gentleman’s Magazine, ix (1739), 37–8, 72–3, 114–16 and 172–6.
4. φοβερώτατον: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III. vi. 2.
5. Sir Thomas More: Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), lawyer, statesman and humanist; Lord Chancellor 1529–32; friend of Erasmus. Johnson alludes to a passage in Book One of Utopia (1516), in which a character, Raphael Hythlodaeus (and thus not More himself), advocates a policy of controlling crime, not by the threat of ever more savage punishments, but by mitigating the poverty which leads people to commit crimes.
No. 115. Tuesday, 23 April 1751.
1. JUV: Juvenal, vi. 184.
2. rather than a woman: Reported in Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones, iii. 19.
3. higher species of monkies: Letter to a Young Lady on Her Marriage (1723), in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. H. Davis et al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–68), ix. 83–94.
No. 121. Tuesday, 14 May 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. xix. 19.
2. great Mantuan poet: I.e. Virgil.
3. infernal regions: Homer, Odyssey, book xi.
4. to the shades: Virgil, Æneid, book vi.
5. directions to a painter: A reference to the seventeenth-century vogue – initiated by Edmund Waller’s panegyrical ‘Instructions to a Painter’ and sustained in Andrew Marvell’s satirical ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ – of composing poems in the form of guidance to a painter.
6. written no language: A reference to the comment in Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries (1640), that ‘Spencer, in affecting the Ancients, writ no Language: Yet I would have him read for his matter; but as Virgil read Ennius’ (Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, volume viii, ‘The Poems. The Prose Works’ (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1947), p. 618).
7. so much diversity: For an amusing late eighteenth-century attempt to provide English with the same harmonious endings enjoyed by Italian, see the scheme of John Pinkerton as described by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his ‘Gibbon’s Last Project’, in David Womersley (ed.), Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Lectures (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1997), p. 407.
8. observed by Milton: A reference to the ‘Preface’ to Paradise Lost and Milton’s notorious justification of his own choice of ‘English heroic verse without rhyme’ for that poem by reference to what he calls ‘the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’.
9. imitators of Spenser: A reference to eighteenth-century imitations of Edmund Spenser, of which perhaps the best-known is James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748).
10. in the play: Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, II. ii. 166.
No. 129. Tuesday, 11 June 1751.
1. OVID: Ovid, Ars Amatoria, ii. 33–8.
2. frigorifick: Cooling.
3. far from necessity: Pythagoras, Aurea Carmina, 1. 8.
No. 134. Saturday, 29 June 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Odes, IV. vii. 17–18.
2. Tantalus: In Greek mythology, Tantalus was the father of Pelops and Niobe. He was punished in Hades by having the water and food he craved always just out of reach.
3. Palladio: Andrea Palladio (1508–80), an Italian neo-classical architect of the late Renaissance.
No. 135. Tuesday, 2 July 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. xi. 27.
2. an imitative being: Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 1 (1448b 4).
3. society of solitude: Milton, Paradise Lost, ix. 249.
4. Ptolemaick and Copernican system: Ptolemy, or Claudius Ptole-maeus (fl. second century AD), an Alexandrian astronomer, developed a theory of planetary motion which placed the earth in a stationary, central position. This theory held the field until Copernicus, or Nicolas Koppernik (1473–1543), a Polish astronomer, propounded the rival theory that the planets, including the earth, move in orbits around the sun.
5. Milton justly observes: Milton, Paradise Lost, ix. 445–51.
6. Dryads: In classical mythology, nymphs associated with trees.
No. 137. Tuesday, 9 July 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Satires, I. ii. 24.
2. Divide and conquer: A proverbial saying, dating in English from the early seventeenth century, translating the Latin tag ‘divide et impera’.
3. as Locke has observed: John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, § 28.
4. the use of books: Johnson slightly misremembers a passage from Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Studies’: ‘Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation’ (Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. J. Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 209).
5. the simile of Longinus: ‘Longinus’, On the Sublime, ix. 13.
No. 142. Saturday, 27 July 1751.
1. HOM: Homer, Odyssey, ix. 187–91.
2. Drake: Sir Francis Drake (? 1540–96), sailor and circumnavigator of the globe.
3. replevin: In law, the restoration to a person of goods taken from him, provided that he undertakes to have the matter tried in a court of law, and to return the goods should the judgment go against him.
4. if he is hated, he is likewise feared: An allusion to the saying of the Emperor Caligula, who was fond of quoting a line from the tragic poet Accius, ‘Oderint, dum metuant’ – ‘Let them hate me, as long as they also fear me’ (Suetonius, ‘Gaius (Caligula)’, xxx. 2).
No. 145. Tuesday, 6 August 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Odes, IV. ix. 5–8. Pindar (c. 520–c. 440 BC), a major Greek lyric poet; Alcaeus (fl. 7–6th century BC), a Greek lyric poet; Stesichorus (c. 640–c. 555 BC), a Greek lyric poet.
2. several thousands: Presumably a reference to the ‘Preface’ to Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub, in which he proposes the erection of a ‘large Academy… capable of containing nine thousand seven hundred forty and three Persons; which by modest Computation is reckoned to be pretty near the current Number of Wits in this Island’ (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, second edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 41).
3. hackneyed in the ways of men: Cf. 1 Henry IV, III. ii. 40.
4. Ephemeræ: Literally, insects which live for only one day; therefore, metaphorically, transient and trifling works.
No. 146. Saturday, 10 August 1751.
1. MART: Martial, XI. i. 13–16.
2. Crab or Childers: Both the names of race horse
s of the time.
3. supplying no children to the commonwealth: Perhaps a confusion in Johnson’s mind between the response of the Roman matrons to the murder of Verginia by Appius (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, iii. 48), and the plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.
4. a turtle feast: A particularly lavish City feast, at which turtle (proverbially a favourite food of aldermen) would be served.
5. the monument: The monument to the Great Fire of London; cf. Pope, Epistle to Bathurst, 11. 339–40.
No. 148. Saturday, 17 August 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Odes, III. xi. 45–8.
2. from the parent to the magistrate: Cf. the Pompeian and Cornelian laws de sicariis and de parricidis.
3. naturally monarchical: Aristotle, Politics, I. ii. 21.
No. 151. Tuesday, 27 August 1751.
1. PIND: Pindar, Olympia, vii. 44–8.
2. WEST: Gilbert West (1703–56), civil servant and poet.
3. climactericks: A critical or fatal period of life, at which the vital forces begin to decline.
No. 156. Saturday, 14 September 1751.
1. JUV: Juvenal, xiv. 321.
2. original constitution: A glance at the Machiavellian doctrine of the ricorso.
3. vacant to her slaves: Herodotus, IV. i–iv.
4. upon the stage: Horace, Ars Poetica, 1. 192.
5. Bacchus: Another name for Dionysus. In Greek mythology the son of Zeus and Semele; his cult incorporated elements of ecstasy and mysticism, and he was closely associated with tragedy.
No. 158. Saturday, 21 September 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Ars Poetica, 1. 78.
2. the Meonian eagle: I.e. Homer.
3. Ciceronians of the sixteenth century: A reference to those, such as Roger Ascham (1515–68), who modelled their style on that of Cicero (106–43 BC), the Roman statesman, philosopher and man of letters. Johnson composed an anonymous ‘Life’ of Ascham for the 1761 edition of his works.
4. precept of Horace: Joseph Addison, Spectator No. 303, Saturday, 16 February 1712.
5. Cyclope Charybdim: Horace, Ars Poetica, 11. 144–5.
6. και ήμîν: Homer, Odyssey, i. 1–10.
No. 159. Tuesday, 24 September 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. i. 34–5.
2. Verecundulus: The author of the letter in Rambler No. 157.
3. forborn to speak: Untraced.
4. powerful fascination: Socrates prepares Alcibiades for public life in Alcibiades I; cf. especially 105E and 106C.
No. 161. Tuesday, 1 October 1751.
1. HOM: Homer, Iliad, vi. 146.
2. the tomb of Archimedes: Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, V. xxiii. 64.
3. the Conqueror’s survey: The Domesday Book, a register of property compiled on the order of William the Conqueror.
4. magna voco: Ovid, Amores, III. xv. 14.
5. a cousin in Cheapside: In other words, she was a kept woman.
6. ναίει: Hesiod, Works and Days, 1. 8.
7. the observation of Juvenal: Juvenal, xiii. 159–60.
No. 165. Tuesday, 15 October 1751.
1. ANTIPHILUS: Greek Anthology, ix. 138.
No. 167. Tuesday, 22 October 1751.
1. MART: Martial, IV. xiii. 7–10.
2. concordia discors: ‘Harmony of dissonance’, Horace, Epistles, I. xii. 19.
No. 168. Saturday, 26 October 1751.
1. PHÆDRUS: Phaedrus, Fabulae Aesopiae, IV. ii. 5–7.
2. mein: Obsolete form of ‘mien’, meaning ‘air’, ‘bearing’ or ‘manner’.
3. to examine things: Johnson has in mind this passage, from the opening to ‘Reflexion IX’ of Reflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rheteur Longin: ‘Il n’y a rien qui avilisse davantage un discours que les mots bas. On souffrira plutost, generalement parlant, une pensée basse exprimée en termes nobles, que la pensée la plus noble exprimée en termes bas. La raison de cela est, que tout le monde ne peut pas juger de la justesse & de la force d’une pensée: mais qu’il n’y a presque personne, sur tout dans les Langues vivantes, qui ne sente la bassesse des mots’ (Nicolas Boileaux Despreaux, Oeuvres de Nicolas Boileaux Despreaux, ‘Nouvelle Edition’, première partie (Paris, 1713), p. 550). ‘Nothing lowers a discourse so much as base diction. In general, one can more easily tolerate a low thought dressed in noble language, than the most noble thought imaginable expressed in base diction. The reason for this is that not every one can gauge the justness and vigour of a thought, but there is hardly anyone who is not sensitive to the baseness of diction, above all in living languages.’)
4. To cry, hold, hold!: Shakespeare, Macbeth, I. v. 48–52, where the lines are spoken by Lady Macbeth.
5.: Homer, Iliad, viii. 111.
6. membra secures: Lucan, Pharsalia, iii. 430–31.
7. preternatural beauty: Virgil, Æneid, i. 586–93.
No. 170. Saturday, 2 November 1751.
1. OVID: Ovid, Amores, II. iv. 3.
2. wip’d them soon: Milton, Paradise Lost, xii. 645.
3. mercer’s: A dealer in silks or velvets.
No. 171. Tuesday, 5 November 1751.
1. VIRG: Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 451.
2. best head: ‘Head’ here means ‘head-dress’, cf. OED.
3. pent-houses: This was defined by Johnson as ‘a shed hanging out aslope from the main wall.’
No. 176. Saturday, 23 November 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Satires, I. vi. 5.
2. boar of Ergmanth .. lion of Nemea: Two of the six labours of Hercules.
3. exultations of his antagonist: Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566), Renaissance Latin poet; and author of De Arte Poetica (1527), influential in eighteenth-century England through the editions by Basil Kennett (Oxford, 1701) and Thomas Tristram (Oxford, 1723), as well as the translation by Christopher Pitt (1725; second edition, 1742). De Arte Poetica, iii. 469–72.
4. sinistrous: Malicious or prejudiced.
No. 181. Tuesday, 10 December 1751.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. xviii. 110.
No. 183. Tuesday, 17 December 1751.
1. LUCAN: Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 92–3.
2. ships are but boards: Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, I. iii. 20.
No. 184. Saturday, 21 December 1751.
1. JUV: Juvenal, x. 347–8.
No. 188. Saturday, 4 January 1752.
1. MART: Martial, II. lv. 3.
2. Sardinian Laughter: Homer, Odyssey, xx. 302 (where it is characterized by a mixture of wrath and scorn).
3. not always necessary to be reverenced: A reproof of the Machiavellian doctrine, that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved; cf. The Prince, ch. xvii.
No. 191. Tuesday, 14 January 1752.
1. HOR: Horace, Ars Poetica, 1. 163.
2. flambeaus: Large torches; here by extension the bearers of such torches.
3. leading-strings: Strings with which children are guided and supported when learning to walk.
No. 196. Saturday, 1 February 1752.
1. HOR: Horace, Ars Poetica, ll. 175–6.
2. disposed him to change: Richard Baxter (1615–91), puritan divine. The reference is to his Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. M. Sylvester (1696), i. 124–38, where the section begins: ‘Because it is Soul-Experiments which those that urge me to this kind of Writing, do expect that I should especially communicate to others, and I have said little of God’s dealing with my Soul since the time of my younger Years, I shall only give the Reader so much Satisfaction, as to acquaint him truly what Change God hath made upon my Mind and Heart since those unriper times, and wherein I now differ in Judgment and Disposition from my self…’
No. 207. Tuesday, 10 March 1752.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. i. 8–9.
2. the first and the last: Attributed to Palladas, Greek Anthology, xi. 381.
3. in procinctu: To be in readiness.
4. supervenient: Occurring subsequent to something else.
No. 208. Saturday, 14 March 1752.
; 1. DIOG. LAERT: Greek Anthology, vii. 128.
2.happens to be known: Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), Italian humanist. Book of the Courtier, ii 11.
3. irregular combinations: Here the congruence of The Rambler with the Dictionary is apparent.
4. αμοιβή: Dionysius Periegetes, 1. 1186.
THE ADVENTURER
Johnson contributed twenty-nine essays to The Adventurer, which ran from 7 November 1752 to 9 March 1754. The publisher was again John Payne, one of the triumvirate who had published The Rambler. The text for this edition is based on the ‘second’ edition of 1754, after which Johnson seems to have made no substantive changes to the wording of the essays.
No. 39. Tuesday, 20 March 1753.
1. HOM: Homer, Odyssey, v. 491–3.
2. POPE: Slightly misquoted. It should read: ‘TillPallas pour’d soft slumbers on his eyes; / And golden dreams (the gift of sweet repose) / Lull’d all his cares, and banish’d all his woes’ (v. 635–37).
3.FONTENELLE: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1667–1757), French man of letters. Johnson is thinking of the following conversation, from the ‘Premier Soir’ of the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, in which the character of Fontenelle is speaking to ‘la Marquise’: ‘J’ai toûjours senti ce que vous me dites, reprit-elle, j’aime les Etoiles, & je me plaindrois volontiers du Soleil qui nous les efface. Ah! m’écriai-je, je ne puis lui pardonner de me faire perdre de vûë tous ces Mondes….je me suis mis dans la tête que chaque Etoile pourroit bien être un Monde’ (Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, ‘Nouvelle Edition’ (La Haye, 1733), p. 15). ‘I have always felt what you say, she replied, I love the stars, and I would willingly rail at the sun which makes them invisible to us. Ah! I cried, I can never forgive it for denying me the sight of all those worlds… I’ve taken it into my head that each star could indeed be a world.’
Selected Essays (Penguin Classics) Page 67
