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Updated: June 5, 2025
When, at the age of sixty-eight, Johnson was writing these "Lives of the English Poets," he had caused omissions to be made from the poems of Rochester, and was asked whether he would allow the printers to give all the verse of Prior. Boswell quoted a censure by Lord Hailes of "those impure tales which will be the eternal opprobrium of their ingenious author."
JOHNSON. 'Sir, there is no doubt as to peculiarities: the question is, whether a man's vices should be mentioned; for instance, whether it should be mentioned that Addison and Parnell drank too freely: for people will probably more easily indulge in drinking from knowing this; so that more ill may be done by the example, than good by telling the whole truth . Here was an instance of his varying from himself in talk; for when Lord Hailes and he sat one morning calmly conversing in my house at Edinburgh, I well remember that Dr.
I never walk except on Saturdays. A full allowance, surely, all this for one who regrets his sad impotence in study, and writes the letters to Lord Hailes which we shall quote later.
I mentioned Lord Hailes's censure of Prior, in his Preface to a collection of Sacred Poems, by various hands, published by him at Edinburgh a great many years ago, where he mentions, 'those impure tales which will be the eternal opprobrium of their ingenious authour. JOHNSON. 'Sir, Lord Hailes has forgot. There is nothing in Prior that will excite to lewdness.
I shall suppose Scotchmen made necessarily, and Englishmen by choice. This was one of Dr Johnson's best days. He was quite in his element. All was literature and taste, without any interruption. Lord Hailes, who is one of the best philologists in Great Britain, who has written papers in the World, and a variety of other works in prose and in verse, both Latin and English, pleased him highly.
I said, Percy had a great many; that he flowed with them like one of the brooks here. JOHNSON. 'If Percy is like one of the brooks here, Birch was like the river Thames. Birch excelled Percy in that, as much as Percy excels Goldsmith. I mentioned Lord Hailes as a man of anecdote.
'The teeming mother, anxious for her race, Begs, for each birth, the fortune of a face: Yet Vane could tell, what ills from beauty spring, And Sedley curs'd the charms which pleas'd a king . Lord Hailes told him, he was mistaken in the instances he had given of unfortunate fair ones; for neither Vane nor Sedley had a title to that description.
'Did you see much of them? 'Not Lady Adela. Poor lady, she had her own relations with her. She had not by any means recovered the loss of her little boy, and I can quite understand that it must have been too trying for her to see me in his place. I understand from Hailes 'Your Mr. Burford, said Mary, smiling.
Dr John Ogilvie, the author of some portentous and completely forgotten epics, but who is not yet quite lost to sight as the writer of the sixty-second paraphrase of Scripture, 'Lo! in the last of days behold. A subsequent 'evening by ourselves' he describes to Lord Hailes in the wariest manner, so as to secure his father's consent to a plan of travel.
'This is to me, he writes in his great work, 'a memorable year; for in it I had the happiness to obtain the acquaintance of that extraordinary man whose memoirs I am now writing; an acquaintance which I shall ever esteem as one of the most fortunate circumstances of my life. We have seen how Lord Hailes, had on the 1758 circuit, mentioned to him the name of Johnson; how in Glasgow Gentleman had given him a representation of 'dictionary Johnson; how Derrick in 1760, during his first visit to London, had promised to introduce this youth of twenty to the great dictator of literature; and Sheridan, the father of the dramatist, when in Edinburgh in 1761, giving public lectures on elocution, had made a similar promise.
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