a man heated in talk, and eager of victory, takes advantage of the mistakes or ignorance of his adversary, lays hold of concessions to which he knows he has no right, and urges proofs likely to prevail on his opponent, though he knows himself that they have no force.’  J. S. Mill gives somewhat the same account of his own father.  ’I am inclined to think,’ he writes, ’that he did injustice to his own opinions by the unconscious exaggerations of an intellect emphatically polemical; and that when thinking without an adversary in view, he was willing to make room for a great portion of the truths he seemed to deny.’  Mill’s Autobiography, p. 201.  See also ante, ii. 100, 450, in. 23, 277, 331; and post, May 18, 1784, and Steevens’s account of Johnson just before June 22, 1784.

[361] Thomas Shaw, D.D., author of Travels to Barbary and the Levant.

[362] See ante, iii. 314.

[363] The friend very likely was Boswell himself.  He was one of ’these tanti men.’  ’I told Paoli that in the very heat of youth I felt the nom est tanti, the omnia vanitas of one who has exhausted all the sweets of his being, and is weary with dull repetition.  I told him that I had almost become for ever incapable of taking a part in active life.’  Boswell’s Corsica, ed. 1879, p. 193.

[364] Letters on the English Nation:  By Batista Angeloni, a Jesuit, who resided many years in London.  Translated from the original Italian by the Author of the Marriage Act.  A Novel. 2 vols.  London [no printer’s name given], 1755.  Shebbeare published besides six Letters to the People of England in the years 1755-7, for the last of which he was sentenced to the pillory. Ante, iii. 315, note I. Horace Walpole (Letters, iii. 74) described him in 1757 as ’a broken Jacobite physician, who has threatened to write himself into a place or the pillory.’

[365] I recollect a ludicrous paragraph in the newspapers, that the King had pensioned both a He-bear and a She-bear.  BOSWELL.  See ante, ii. 66, and post, April 28, 1783.

[366]

        Witness, ye chosen train
     Who breathe the sweets of his Saturnian reign;
     Witness ye Hills, ye Johnsons, Scots, Shebbeares,
     Hark to my call, for some of you have ears.’

Heroic Epistle.  See post, under June 16, 1784.

[367] In this he was unlike the King, who, writes Horace Walpole,’ expecting only an attack on Chambers, bought it to tease, and began reading it to, him; but, finding it more bitter on himself, flung it down on the floor in a passion, and would read no more.’ Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 187.

[368] They were published in 1773 in a pamphlet of 16 pages, and, with the good fortune that attends a muse in the peerage, reached a third edition in the year.  To this same earl the second edition of Byron’s Hours of Idleness was ’dedicated by his obliged ward and affectionate kinsman, the author.’  In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, he is abused in the passage which begins:—­