"Such was the rapid appearance and disappearance, the very transient visit of this great man, to an University super-eminently famous in itself for the production of great men. It was a visit, however, of which he spoke afterwards in town, to the writer of this account, with very pleasing recollections. Though he must have been well known to many of the Heads and Doctors at this seat of learning, yet he seemed studious to preserve a strict incognito; his only aim being an introduction to his favourite scholar, his brother patriot and antiquary, who was then Mr. but afterwards Dr. Farmer, and master of his college, and who finally declined episcopacy. Merit like Johnson's seeks not publicity; it follows not fame, but leaves fame to follow it. Had he visited Cambridge at the Commencement, or on some public occasion, he would doubtless have met with the honours due to the bright luminary of a sister University; and yet, even these honours, however genuine and desirable, the modesty of conscious excellence seems rather to have prompted him to avoid. B. N. TURNER."

3. Rev. Mr. Turner's Second Johnsonian Letter.

"MR. EDITOR, Denton, Lincolnshire, July 20, 1819. Having, rather incautiously perhaps, made you a sort of a promise of adding something to the account I before transmitted, respecting the intercourse I once enjoyed with the late Dr. Johnson, I have been rather checked, in limine, by the consideration of the comparative unimportance of what remains to be told. And yet, since it may be desirable to contemplate such a man in various moods and under different circumstances, and since he himself has directed that biography should not consist wholly of panegyric, the objection may not be material. In consequence, therefore, of my first letters having been honoured by the attention of more than one gentleman of eminence, I am encouraged to proceed; and I shall, at the same time, introduce to the reader's notice another literary friend, whose character may form no unfit accompaniment, even to that of the incomparable Johnson. Yet still what I am the most apprehensive of is, lest in the sequel I should be almost inevitably led into such a strain of egotism as the reader, however indulgently disposed, might find it difficult to excuse.

"In my present essay, my late dear friend Dr. Percy, afterwards Bishop of Dromore, will necessarily be as conspicuous as Dr. Johnson himself. Dr. Percy, besides his apartments in Northumberland-house, had a residence for his lady and family in Half-moon-street, Piccadilly, and there it was that I dined on the day of the Johnsonian visit, which I before left undescribed. The company, besides the Doctor and his Nanny, the fairest of the fair, whose appearance and manners did no discredit to the charming song, consisted of the blind poetess, Anna Wil

liams, from Dr. Johnson's, a Mr. Percy, a relation of the Doctor's, and myself. Dr. Percy had just before published his 'Hermit of Warksworth,' and when the ladies were withdrawn, he began to tell us that he had consulted Johnson on that publication, and appeared very much dissatisfied with his behaviour on the occasion. Having been for some time prevented by lameness from seeing Dr. Johnson, I proposed escorting Mrs. Williams home in a coach that evening, and paying my compliments to her patron, to which Dr. Percy consented, on my promising to return to Half-moon-street.

"At Bolt-court (I think it was) I found the great man in an upper-room, not quite alone to be sure, for at an humble distance sat a little, shrivelled, greasy-looking old fellow, whom I took for a printer's devil, though something was said about his being an amanuensis. As I was come directly from Dr. Percy, the conversation turned naturally upon him and his new Poem. Here it should be premised, that our sage had, some how or other, acquired a sort of distaste or contempt for the minstrelsy of the dark ages. Should this be wondered at, we may recollect, that the brightest geniuses are not exempt from whims or imperfections; nay, rather, we cannot fail to remark, that the greatest strength of mind has ordinarily been attended by some such weaknesses, as might prevent its too great preponderancy.

"The substance of the conversation which then ensued, as far as it can now be recollected, was as follows :

"Johnson. 6 Why, yes, Sir, he showed me his Poem, but I could give him no great encouragement.' 'No!' I answered, affecting a surprise, why, surely, Doctor, it is a pleasing and very creditable imitation of those ancient bards and minstrels who formerly charmed and refined our too rude and unpolished ancestors.' Johnson. 'Aye, Sir, but were they worth imitating?' I professed that I had often been charmed myself with their lyric strains, and knew of many others who had been so too. I urged that this kind of poetry was to my friend, as it were, hereditary ; observing, that he had so intensely studied their composition, he might well be expected to have caught their manner of writing; and I well remember mentioning the now-forgotten name of some ancient scholar, who is recorded to have read Virgil till he acquired a style perfectly Virgilian. Johnson. Why, yes, Sir, and that was something worth acquiring, which cannot be said of the sing-song of your bards.' I still, however, advocated the minstrel cause, alleging that I could see no reason why the manners and poetry attending the revival of literature might not be as worthy of observation as those which rendered Homer, &c. so illustrious at the first dawnings of it. I even suspected that the latter era was the more curious of the two, from its striking singularities-its gallantry tempered with gentleness, whence (our word gentleman-its mixture of pathos with simplicity, and its rich machinery of witch-ladies, enchanters, giants, and dwarfs.

Johnson. Such trifles, indeed, might amuse us during the nonage of science; but the world has now outgrown them, Sir.' I respectfully suggested, however, that there were things which the world might fancy it had outgrown, while the more proper account might be, that it had lost them by the way, and would be very happy to recover them; and I instanced gothic architecture and painted glass, as sciences coeval with our bards. In short, the great man's complacency and appearance of being amused by my loquacity, encouraged me to rattle on at such a rate, that, whenever I casually glanced at our greasy listener in the corner, I saw him with his hands and eyes lifted up, in utter astonishment at my inconceivable audacity! While the Doctor, in perfect good humour and glee, crowned the whole by the following ludicrous impromptu: Sir, it is an infantine style, which any man may imitate who thinks proper to try. As, for instance,

I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand;
And there I met another man
With his hat in his hand.'

"On my return to Half-moon-street, I found that Dr. Percy had just heard from his publisher; and with great agitation, and in no very gentle terms, was inveighing to his cousin and namesake, against the then object of his resentment, whom I had just parted from.-' Fool that I was,' said he, 'to trust such a fellow. He has persuaded me to print but 500 copies, and now the public calls for a second edition, before I have any means of judging how it has received the first. I never saw his aristocratic spirit so ruffled and disturbed before; and, indeed, on the present occasion his anger was not without a cause; since to this discouragement it was probably owing, that the success of a very meritorious poetical effort was defeated, and its amateur author disheartened from trying his talents again in his favourite and bewitching pursuits.

"Meanwhile our sage himself, the unconscious and unintentional cause of all the mischief, still indulging the same playful humour, and thinking the joke too good an one to he lost, seems to have been making the most of it in different companies, and especially at Sir Joshua Reynolds's; for we read in Northcote's Life of Sir Joshua, vol. I. p. 81, every reader will recollect the so often told anecdote of Johnson's versification at Mr. Reynolds's tea-table, when criticising Percy's Reliques, and imitating the ballad style

O hear it then, my Renny dear,
Nor hear it with a frown,
You cannot make the tea so fast
As I can gulp it down.'

M

And another account I have somewhere seen of the same joke, and at the same place, but somewhat varied, for it began with the exact words originally elicited, no doubt, by my defence of Percy. After these came one or two more such burlesque stanzas, which ended, Miss Renny being the tea-maker, with

'Then give to me, my Renny dear,
Another cup of tea.'

"I was extremely desirous, on the first occurrence of this curious sally, that, if possible, it should not transpire so as to cause irritation betwixt two such estimable friends. But my precaution was nearly frustrated, since in the papers the very next morning, a most clumsy and blundering attempt was made to report this sarcasm of Johnson, which evidently must have proceeded from our oily companion in the corner; and the only wonder was, that a person in any degree connected with the typography of the journals should have produced so absurd and puzzled an account. Hence, however, I was consoled by the hope, that the matter would remain unintelligible to either party, and therefore no mischief would ensue. For myself, I never suffered the scene I had witnessed to escape iny lips, until I returned, two or three months afterwards, to a truly revered and excellent father in the country, constrained by the renewal, through incautiously walking in town, of an unfortunate lameness of old standing, caused ten years before by a violent scald at College, and which had been nearly cured.

"But here the most powerful of all gratitudes lays a sacred obligation upon me, to stop and to correct the word unfortunate, with a heartful acknowledgement that my forced retreat at that particular juncture, was eventually the cause of all my future success in life. So true is it that, through the unmerited bounty of Providence, our greatest seeming inisfortunes prove frequently in the end no other than blessings in disguise.

Hastening now towards the conclusion of a detail, which even a great name can scarcely render important, I have only to add that, on my coming to town a year or two afterwards, (which, having some relief from my lameness, I frequently did,) Dr. Percy said to me, 'I have been told that Johnson once spoke very disrespectfully of my Northumbrian ballad, but, on my charging him with it, he remembered nothing at all about it. Being, I acknowledge, rather off my guard at the moment, my looks betrayed a consciousness which could not escape the penetrating glance of such a critic, nor did he ever cease his solicitations and promises of forbearance, till he had extorted from me all the truth. Some ebullitions of passion were the consequences; but, soon after, I had the happiness to hear him promise a total oblivion of the business. And, having thus promised, it pretty plainly appears that our ducal Doctor was true to his word, since a subsequent sharp contest is recorded

by Boswell, in which latent resentment would probably have been aroused, had there been any remaining. Boswell gives this as an instance of Johnson's placability; and it seems to me at least as much so of Percy's. The story is told in vol. III. p. 55. 'Johnson was praising Pennant's Tour in Northumberland, Percy resented the account there given of his family. Words ran high. Percy talked about rudeness-and Johnson said, that civility was now at an end,' when Dr. Percy rose, and taking him by the hand, assured him affectionately that his meaning had been misunderstood. Johnson. Dear Sir, I am willing that you shall hang Pennant hang him up, hang him up.' Which surely was equally honourable to both.

"But what I chiefly wished was to introduce the following extract of a letter from Johnson to Boswell in consequence of the above dispute: If Percy is really offended, I am sorry, for he is a man whom I never knew to offend any one. He is a man willing to learn and very able to teach; a man out of whose company I never go without having learned something. Percy's attention to poetry has given grace and splendour to his studies of antiquity. A meer antiquarian (so spelt here) is a rugged being. Upon the whole, you see that what I might say in sport or petulance to him, is very consistent with a full conviction of his merit.' P. 62.

"Thus an amende honorable was made to my friend, though his beautiful Poem seems to have been nipped in the bud. On this I shall here add a few words. It is on a subject happily chosen and sufficiently authentic, and is elegantly written in three fits or cantos. It treats of the return of young Hotspur from Scotland, where he had been educated, under the Regent, ever since his father's defeat and death at Shrewsbury. On his passage he has the happy chance of delivering from banditti Eleanor, daughter of Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, and receives her hand as his reward. Her mother, Johanna, who was half-sister to Henry IV. now applied to Henry V., in their behalf.

She suppliant at her nephew's throne

The royal grace implor'd;

To all the honours of his race

The Percy was restor❜d.'

"I cannot help noticing in this place the comparative mildness and clemency of the two first Lancastrian Princes, considering the age in which they lived. Yet were they obliged to submit entirely to the Pope, from their consciousness of being usurpers. Kennet speaks in the highest terms of both these kings, especially the last. (See his History, vol. I. pp. 305-339.) And yet Sawtre, Bayley, and Cobham, the three protomartyrs of England, were immolated during their reigns; the statute'de heretico comburendo' being actually passed by the father in