could so learned a lady suffer the pleonasm of the following line to escape her pen? "With truth to mingle fables feign'd.” The character of Celia is pretty, but in the satirical strokes lie all the genius of the work. As for the Bas bleu.-You have heard me sigh after the attainment of other languages with hopeless yearning; yet I had rather be ignorant of them, as I am, if I thought their acquisition would induce me to clap my wings and crow in Greek, Latin, and French, through the course of a poem which ought to have been written in an unaffected and unmingled English. I am diverted with its eulogies on Garrick, Mason, and Johnson, who all three hated each other so heartily. Not very pleasantly, I trow, would the two former have sat in the presence of Old Cato, as this poem oddly terms the arrogant Johnson, surrounded by the worshipful and worshipping Blue Stocking.-Had the cynic lived to hear his Whig-title, Cato, I could fancy him saying to the fair author, "You had better have called me the first Whig, Madam, the father of the tribe, who got kicked out of Heaven for his republican principles." To the lady president herself, I fancy the cynic would, not now, were he living, be the most welcome guest, since the publication of Mr. Boswell's Tour. Miss More puts him to bed to little David. Their mutual opiates are pretty powerful, else her quondam friend, Garrick, would not thank her for his companion;-but misery, matrimony, and mortality, make strange bed-fellows. MOLLY ASTON. It is very true, as you observe, Johnson appears much more amiable as a domestic man, in his letters to Mrs. Thrale, than in any other memorial which has been given us of his life and manners; but that was owing to the care with which Mrs. Piozzi weeded them of the prejudiced and malevolent passages on characters, perhaps much more essentially worthy than himself, were they to be tried by the rules of Christian charity. I do not think with you, that his ungrateful virulence against Mrs. Thrale, in marrying Piozzi, arose from his indignation against her on his deceased friend's account. Mr. Boswell told me Johnson wished and expected to have married her himself. You ask who the Molly Aston was, whom those letters mention with such passionate tenderness? Mr. Walmsley, my father's predecessor in this house, was, as you have heard, Johnson's Mecanas, and this lady, his wife's sister, a daughter of Sir Thomas Aston, a wit, a beauty, and a toast. Johnson was always fancying himself in love with some princess or other. His wife's daughter, Lucy Porter, so often mentioned in those letters, was his first love, when he was a school-boy, under my grandfather, a clergyman, vicar of St. Mary's, and master of the free-school, which, by his scholastic ability, was high in fame, and thronged with pupils, from some of the first gentlemen's families in this and the adjoining counties. To the free-school the boys of the city had a right to come, but every body knows how superficial, in general, is unpaid instruction. However, my grandfather, aware of Johnson's genius, took the highest pains with him, though his parents were poor, and mean in their situation, keeping market stalls, as battledore booksellers. Johnson has not had the gratitude once to mention his generous master, in any of his writings; but all this is foreign to your inquiries, who Miss Molly Aston was, and at what period his flame for her commenced? It was during those school-days, when the reputation of Johnson's talents, and rapid progress in the classics, induced the noble-minded Walmsley to endure, at his elegant table, the low-born squalid youth-here that he suffered him and Garrick to "imp their eagle wings," a delighted spectator and auditor of their efforts. It was here that Miss Molly Aston was frequently a visitor in the family of her brother-in-law, and probably amused herself with the uncouth adorations of the learned, though dirty stripling, whose mean appearance was overlooked, because of the genius and knowledge that blazed through him; though with "umbered flames," from constitutional melancholy and spleen. Lucy Porter, whose visit to Lichfield had been but for a few weeks, was then gone back to her parents at Birmingham, and the brighter Molly Aston became the Laura of our Petrarch. Fired, however, at length, with ideal love, and incapable of inspiring mutual inclinations in the young and lively, he married, at twenty-three, the mother of his Lucy, and went to seek his fortune in London. She had borne an indifferent character, during the life of her first husband. He died insolvent, leaving his three grown-up children, dependant on the bounty of his rich bachelor brother in London, who left them largely, but would never do any thing for the worthless widow, who had married "the literary cub," as he used to call him. She lived thirty years with Johnson; if shuddering, half-famished, in an author's garret, could be called living. During her life, the fair and learned devotee, Miss H. Boothby, in the wane of her youth, a woman of family and genteel fortune, encouraged him to resume his Platonisms. After the death of this wife, and this spiritualized mistress, Mrs. Thrale took him up. He loved her for her wit, her beauty, her luxurious table, her coach, and her library; and she loved him for the literary consequence his residence at Streatham threw around her. The rich, the proud, and titled literati, would not have sought Johnson in his dirty garret, nor the wealthy brewer's then uncelebrated wife, without the actual presence, in her saloon d' Apollon, of a votary known to be of the number of the inspired. BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. As yet, I have read only the first volume of Boswell's Life of Johnson. What I foresaw has happened. That ingenious pencil, which so well fulfilled the biographic duty, and painted the despot exactly as he was, when roaming the lonely Hebrides, has, at the impulse of terror, been exchanged for a more glowing one; and, in this work, almost every thing is kept back which could give umbrage to Johnson's idolaters, by justly displaying the darker, as well as fairer, sides of the medal. Ali, however, but his idolaters, must detest the ungrateful duplicity proved upon him, when we find him speaking with slight, bordering upon contempt, of the then Mrs. Thrale, in the zenith of his intimacy with her. Mr. Boswell was not aware, that impartiality would compare what he said of her, with what he said to her. "To hear you," says he, in his letters to that lady," is to hear wisdom; to see is to see virtue." What despicable flattery was that, if he really believed the stores of her mind were trivial, and that she had no truth? while, if conscious that these imputations were unjust, his heart was at once thankless and malevolently false. Such, I confess, amidst all his gloomy piety, I always thought it. That conviction has not receded beneath the contempt of your charming friend, and of Mrs. Montague, which his biographer has so indiscreetly, so impolitely, recorded; nor beneath the lying assertion, that Gray was a dull fellow, and that there are but eight good lines in all his poetry. I hear Mason fares no better in the second volume. Dark and envious calumniator! I both blame Mr. Boswell, and wonder at him for the wanton, because unnecessary, inroads which a number of those records must make upon the feelings of many. But for them, his work had been of great value indeed. Entertaining in the first degree, it certainly is; and, with the most commendable precision, exhibits the events of his life through all their series and changes. It contains a prodigious mass of colloquial wit and humour, which were certainly unrivalled. Let it, however, be remembered, that, to produce their eclipsing and resistless power, many things combined, which a wise and generous mind would not, for its own peace and health, consent to feel, even to possess that unequalled talent; viz. spleen, envy, boundless haughtiness, and utter callousness to all the mental sensibilities of others. I am of St. Paul's mind, who says, where these things are, no alms nor prayers constitute goodness. "Say thou, whose thoughts at humble fame repine, MRS. DELANY AND DR. PARR. In this interesting scene* of friendship, literature, and the arts, I have been introduced to that intellectual luminary, Dr. Parr, and to the celebrated hortus siccus of Mrs. Delany, contained in ten immense folios, each enriched with an hundred floral plants, representing, in cut paper, of infinitely various dyes, the finest flowers of our own and every other climate, from the best specimens that the field, the garden, the greenhouse, and the conservatory, could furnish; and with a fidelity and vividness of colouring, which shames the needle and the pencil. The moss, the films, the farina, every, the minutest, part, is represented with matchless delicacy. It was at the age of seventy-five that this prodigy of female genius invented her art, and gave it that last perfection which makes imitation hopeless. Always a fine painter, and not ignorant of the arts of chemistry, she herself dyed her papers from whence the new creation arose. Of this astonishing work, Dr. Darwin has given a most erroneous description in his splendid poem. He ought not to have taken such a liberty. It represents Mrs. Delany as a mere artificial flowermaker, using wires and wax, and moss, &c., though writing-paper was her sole material-her scissars her only implement. The former, previously coloured by herself, in complete shades of every tint, was never retouched by the pencil after the flower was cut out; nor did she ever make a drawing; but, as her specimen lay before her, she cut from the eye. The easy floating grace of the stalks, the happiness with which the flower or flowers, their leaves and buds, are disposed upon those stalks, is exquisite; while the degree of real relief which they possess, besides that which arises from the skilful deception produced by light and shade, has a richness and natural effect, which the finest pencil cannot hope to attain. What a lesson of exertion does the invention and completion of such a work, after seventy-five, give to that hopeless languor, which people are so prone to indulge in the decline of life? When I had the honour of a visit from Dr. Parr, he staid two days and nights at Wellsburn. I was prepared to expect extraordinary colloquial powers, but they exceeded every description I had received of them. He is styled the Johnson of * The seat of Court Dewes, esq. near Strafford-upon-Avon. the present day. In strength of thought, in promptness and plenteousness of allusion; in wit and humour, in that high-coloured eloquence which results from poetic imagination-there is a very striking similarity to the departed despot. That, when irritated, he can chastise with the same overwhelming force, I can believe; but unprovoked, Dr. Parr is wholly free from the caustic acrimony of that splenetic being. Benign rays of ingenuous urbanity dart in his smile, and from beneath the sable shade of his large and masking eyebrows, and from the fine orbs they overhang. The characters he draws of distinguished people, and of such of his friends, whose talents, though not yet emerged, are considerable, are given with a free, discriminating, and masterly, power, and with general independence of party prejudices. If he throws into deepest shade the vices of those, whose hearts he thinks corrupt, his spirit luxuriates in placing the virtues and abilities of those he esteems, in the fairest and fullest lights; a gratification which the gloomy Johnson seldom, if ever, knew. Dr. Parr is accused of egotism; but, if he often talks of himself, all he says on that, as on every other theme, interests the attention, and charms the fancy. It is surely the dull and the envious only who deem his frankness vanity. Great minds must feel, and have a right to avow their sense of the high ground on which they stand. Who, that has a soul, but is gratified by Milton's avowals of this kind, when in the civil wars, exhorting the soldier to spare his dwelling, the poet declares his power to requite the clemency; to spread the name of him who showed it, over seas and lands, "In every clime the sun's bright circle warms." Dr. Parr is a warm whig, loves our constitution, and ardently wishes its preservation; but he says, malignant and able spirits are at work to overthrow it, and that with their efforts a fatal train of causes co-operate. I saw him depart, with much regret, though his morning, noon, and evening pipe involved us in clouds of tobacco while he staid, but they were gilded by perpetual vollies of genius and wit. HERSELF. Be assured, that if disease, in changing forms, and in successive periods, had not assailed my frame from the date of that letter, with which you favoured me in February, it could not have remained so long unacknowedged. For all its rich contents, as well as for those which came to me from your kind hand last week, accept my sincere thanks. |