[688] Lord Chesterfield wrote in 1747 (Misc.  Works, iv. 231):—­ Drinking is a most beastly vice in every country, but it is really a ruinous one to Ireland; nine gentlemen in ten in Ireland are impoverished by the great quantity of claret, which from mistaken notions of hospitality and dignity, they think it necessary should be drunk in their houses.  This expense leaves them no room to improve their estates by proper indulgence upon proper conditions to their tenants, who must pay them to the full, and upon the very day, that they may pay their wine-merchants.’  In 1754 he wrote (ib.p.359):—­If it would but please God by his lightning to blast all the vines in the world, and by his thunder to turn all the wines now in Ireland sour, as I most sincerely wish he would, Ireland would enjoy a degree of quiet and plenty that it has never yet known.’

[689] See ante, p. 95.

[690] ’The sea being broken by the multitude of islands does not roar with so much noise, nor beat the storm with such foamy violence as I have remarked on the coast of Sussex.  Though, while I was in the Hebrides, the wind was extremely turbulent, I never saw very high billows.’  Johnson’s Works, ix. 65.

[691] Johnson this day thus wrote of Mr. M’Queen to Mrs. Thrale:—­’You find that all the islanders even in these recesses of life are not barbarous.  One of the ministers who has adhered to us almost all the time is an excellent scholar.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 157.

[692] See post, Nov. 6.

[693] This was a dexterous mode of description, for the purpose of his argument; for what he alluded to was, a Sermon published by the learned Dr. William Wishart, formerly principal of the college at Edinburgh, to warn men against confiding in a death-bed repentance of the inefficacy of which he entertained notions very different from those of Dr. Johnson.  BOSWELL.

[694] The Rev. Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 441) thus writes of the English clergy whom he met at Harrogate in 1763:—­’I had never seen so many of them together before, and between this and the following year I was able to form a true judgment of them.  They are, in general—­I mean the lower order—­divided into bucks and prigs; of which the first, though inconceivably ignorant, and sometimes indecent in their morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were unassuming, and had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves like gentlemen.  The other division of them, the prigs, are truly not to be endured, for they are but half learned, are ignorant of the world, narrow-minded, pedantic, and overbearing.  And now and then you meet with a rara avis who is accomplished and agreeable, a man of the world without licentiousness, of learning without pedantry, and pious without sanctimony; but this is a rara avis’.

[695] See ante, i. 446, note 1.