Let Johnson teach me how to place
In fairest light each borrowed grace,
From him I’ll learn to write;
free and easy       Copy his clear and easy style,            clear
And from the roughness of his file,         familiar
like                  Grow as himself—­polite.’               like

Horace Walpole, on Dec. 27, 1775, speaks of these verses as if they were fresh.  ‘They are an answer,’ he writes, ’to a gross brutality of Dr. Johnson, to which a properer answer would have been to fling a glass of wine in his face.  I have no patience with an unfortunate monster trusting to his helpless deformity for indemnity for any impertinence that his arrogance suggests, and who thinks that what he has read is an excuse for everything he says.’  Horace Walpole’s Letters, vi. 302.  It is strange that Walpole should be so utterly ignorant of Johnson’s courage and bodily strength.  The date of Walpole’s letter makes me suspect that Richard Burke dated his Jan. 6, 1775 (he should have written 1776), and that the blunder of a copyist has changed 1775 into 1773.

APPENDIX B.

(Page 238.)

Had Boswell continued the quotation from Priestley’s Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity he would have shown that though Priestley could not hate the rioters, he could very easily prosecute them.  He says:—­

’If as a Necessarian I cease to blame men for their vices in the ultimate sense of the word, though, in the common and proper sense of it, I continue to do as much as other persons (for how necessarily soever they act, they are influenced by a base and mischievous disposition of mind, against which I must guard myself and others in proportion as I love myself and others),’ &c.  Priestley’s Works, iii. 508.

Of his interview with Johnson, Priestley, in his Appeal to the Public, part ii, published in 1792 (Works, xix. 502), thus writes, answering ’the impudent falsehood that when I was at Oxford Dr. Johnson left a company on my being introduced to it’:—­

’In fact we never were at Oxford at the same time, and the only interview I ever had with him was at Mr. Paradise’s, where we dined together at his own request.  He was particularly civil to me, and promised to call upon me the next time he should go through Birmingham.  He behaved with the same civility to Dr. Price, when they supped together at Dr. Adams’s at Oxford.  Several circumstances show that Dr. Johnson had not so much of bigotry at the decline of life as had distinguished him before, on which account it is well known to all our common acquaintance, that I declined all their pressing solicitations to be introduced to him.’

Priestley expresses himself ill, but his meaning can be made out.  Parr answered Boswell in the March number of the Gent.  Mag. for 1795, p. 179.  But the evidence that he brings is rendered needless by Priestley’s positive statement.  May peace henceforth fall on ’Priestley’s injured name.’ (Mrs. Barbauld’s Poems, ii. 243.)