Of an acquaintance of ours,whose manners and every thing about him,though expensive,were coarse,he said,'Sir,you see in him vulgar prosperity.'
A foreign minister of no very high talents,who had been in his company for a considerable time quite overlooked,happened luckily to mention that he had read some of his Rambler in Italian,and admired it much.This pleased him greatly;he observed that the title had been translated,Il Genio errante,though I have been told it was rendered more ludicrously,Il Vagabondo;and finding that this minister gave such a proof of his taste,he was all attention to him,and on the first remark which he made,however simple,exclaimed,'The Ambassadour says well--His Excellency observes--'And then he expanded and enriched the little that had been said,in so strong a manner,that it appeared something of consequence.This was exceedingly entertaining to the company who were present,and many a time afterwards it furnished a pleasant topick of merriment:'The Ambassadour says well,'became a laughable term of applause,when no mighty matter had been expressed.
I left London on Monday,October 15,and accompanied Colonel Stuart to Chester,where his regiment was to lye for some time.
1780:AETAT.71.]--In 1780,the world was kept in impatience for the completion of his Lives of the Poets,upon which he was employed so far as his indolence allowed him to labour.
His friend Dr.Lawrence having now suffered the greatest affliction to which a man is liable,and which Johnson himself had felt in the most severe manner;Johnson wrote to him in an admirable strain of sympathy and pious consolation.
'TO DR.LAWRENCE.
'DEAR SIR,--At a time when all your friends ought to shew their kindness,and with a character which ought to make all that know you your friends,you may wonder that you have yet heard nothing from me.
'I have been hindered by a vexatious and incessant cough,for which within these ten days I have been bled once,fasted four or five times,taken physick five times,and opiates,I think,six.This day it seems to remit.
'The loss,dear Sir,which you have lately suffered,I felt many years ago,and know therefore how much has been taken from you,and how little help can be had from consolation.He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved,sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes,and fears,and interest;from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil;and with whom he could set his mind at liberty,to retrace the past or anticipate the future.The continuity of being is lacerated;the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped;and life stands suspended and motionless,till it is driven by external causes into a new channel.But the time of suspense is dreadful.
'Our first recourse in this distressed solitude,is,perhaps for want of habitual piety,to a gloomy acquiescence in necessity.Of two mortal beings,one must lose the other;but surely there is a higher and better comfort to be drawn from the consideration of that Providence which watches over all,and a belief that the living and the dead are equally in the hands of God,who will reunite those whom he has separated;or who sees that it is best not to reunite.I am,dear Sir,your most affectionate,and most humble servant,'January 20,1780.'
'SAM.JOHNSON.'
On the 2nd of May I wrote to him,and requested that we might have another meeting somewhere in the North of England,in the autumn of this year.
From Mr.Langton I received soon after this time a letter,of which I extract a passage,relative both to Mr.Beauclerk and Dr.
Johnson.
'The melancholy information you have received concerning Mr.