[382] Now Bishop of Llandaff, one of the poorest Bishopricks in this kingdom.  His Lordship has written with much zeal to show the propriety of equalizing the revenues of Bishops.  He has informed us that he has burnt all his chemical papers.  The friends of our excellent constitution, now assailed on every side by innovators and levellers, would have less regretted the suppression of some of this Lordship’s other writings.  BOSWELL.  Boswell refers to A Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury by Richard, Lord Bishop of Landaff, 1782.  If the revenues were made more equal, ‘the poorer Bishops,’ the Bishop writes, ’would be freed from the necessity of holding ecclesiastical preferments in commendam with their Bishopricks,’ p. 8.

[383] De Quincey says that Sir Humphry Davy told him, ’that he could scarcely imagine a time, or a condition of the science, in which the Bishop’s Essays would be superannuated.’  De Quincey’s Works, ii. 106.  De Quincey describes the Bishop as being ’always a discontented man, a railer at the government and the age, which could permit such as his to pine away ingloriously in one of the humblest among the Bishopricks.’ Ib. p. 107.  He was, he adds, ‘a true Whig,’ and would have been made Archbishop of York had his party staid in power a little longer in 1807.’

[384] Rasselas, chap. xi.

[385] See Boswell’s Hebrides, Sept. 30.

[386] ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.’ Genesis, iii. 8.

[387]

     ...  ’Vivendi recte qui prorogat horam,
     Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille
     Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.’

     ’And sure the man who has it in his power
      To practise virtue, and protracts the hour,
      Waits like the rustic till the river dried;
      Still glides the river, and will ever glide.’

FRANCIS.  Horace, Epist. i. 2. 41.

[388] See ante, p. 59.

[389] See ante, iii. 251.

[390] See ante, iii. 136.

[391] This assertion is disproved by a comparison of dates.  The first four satires of Young were published in 1725; The South Sea scheme (which appears to be meant,) was in 1720.  MALONE.  In Croft’s Life of Young, which Johnson adopted, it is stated:—­’By the Universal Passion he acquired no vulgar fortune, more than L3000.  A considerable sum had already been swallowed up in the South Sea.’  Johnson’s Works, viii. 430.  Some of Young’s poems were published before 1720.

[392] Crabbe got Johnson to revise his poem, The Village (post, under March 23, 1783).  He states, that ’the Doctor did not readily comply with requests for his opinion; not from any unwillingness to oblige, but from a painful contention in his mind between a desire of giving pleasure and a determination to speak truth.’  Crabbe’s Works, ii. 12.  See ante, ii. 51, 195, and iii. 373.