[372] Dr. Barnard, formerly Dean of Derry.  See ante, iii. 84.

[373] This gave me very great pleasure, for there had been once a pretty smart altercation between Dr. Barnard and him, upon a question, whether a man could improve himself after the age of forty-five; when Johnson in a hasty humour, expressed himself in a manner not quite civil.  Dr. Barnard made it the subject of a copy of pleasant verses, in which he supposed himself to learn different perfections from different men.  They concluded with delicate irony:—­

     ’Johnson shall teach me how to place
      In fairest light each borrow’d grace;
        From him I’ll learn to write;
      Copy his clear familiar style,
      And by the roughness of his file
        Grow, like himself, polite.’

I know not whether Johnson ever saw the poem, but I had occasion to find that as Dr. Barnard and he knew each other better, their mutual regard increased.  BOSWELL.  See Appendix A.

[374] See ante, ii. 357, iii. 309, and post, March 23, 1783.

[375] ’Sir Joshua once asked Lord B——­ to dine with Dr. Johnson and the rest, but though a man of rank and also of good information, he seemed as much alarmed at the idea as if you had tried to force him into one of the cages at Exeter-Change.’  Hazlitt’s Conversations of Northcote, p. 41.

[376] Yet when he came across them he met with much respect.  At Alnwick he was, he writes, ’treated with great civility by the Duke of Northumberland.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 108.  At Inverary, the Duke and Duchess of Argyle shewed him great attention.  Boswell’s Hebrides, Oct. 25.  In fact, all through his Scotch tour he was most politely welcomed by ‘the great.’  At Chatsworth, he was ‘honestly pressed to stay’ by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (post, Sept. 9, 1784).  See ante, iii. 21.  On the other hand, Mrs. Barbauld says:—­’I believe it is true that in England genius and learning obtain less personal notice than in most other parts of Europe.’  She censures ’the contemptuous manner in which Lady Wortley Montagu mentioned Richardson:—­“The doors of the Great,” she says, “were never opened to him."’ Richardson Corres. i. clxxiv.

[377] When Lord Elibank was seventy years old, he wrote:—­’I shall be glad to go five hundred miles to enjoy a day of his company.’  Boswell’s Hebrides, Sept. 12.

[378] Romans, x. 2.

[379] I Peter, iii. 15.

[380] Horace Walpole wrote three years earlier:—­’ Whig principles are founded on sense; a Whig may be a fool, a Tory must be so.’ Letters, vii. 88.

[381] Mr. Barclay, a descendant of Robert Barclay, of Ury, the celebrated apologist of the people called Quakers, and remarkable for maintaining the principles of his venerable progenitor, with as much of the elegance of modern manners, as is consistent with primitive simplicity, BOSWELL.