Aetat. 54.] Johnson's opinion of Gray's poetry. "Is there ever a man in all Scotland From the highest estate to the lowest degree, &c." And then, Sir, "Yes, there is a man in Westmoreland, And Johnny Armstrong they do him call." 467 There, now, you plunge at once into the subject. You have no previous narration to lead you to it. The two next lines in that Ode are, I think, very good: "Though fann'd by conquest's crimson wing, Here let it be observed, that although his opinion of Gray's poetry was widely different from mine, and I believe from that of most men of taste", by whom it is with justice highly admired, there is certainly much absurdity in the clamour which has been raised, as if he had been culpably injurious celebrated; but technical beauties can give praise only to the inventor. It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his subject that has read the ballad of Johnny Armstrong.' Johnson's Works, viii. 485. 1 My friend Mr. Malone, in his valuable comments on Shakspeare, has traced in that great poet the disjecta membra of these lines. BosWELL. Gray, in the edition of The Bard of the year 1768, in a note on these lines had quoted from King John, act v. sc. I: Mocking the air with colours idly spread.' Gosse's Gray, i. 41. But Malone quotes also from Macbeth, act i. sc. 2 :— 'Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky And fan our people cold.' 'Out of these passages,' he said, 'Mr. Gray seems to have framed the first stanza of his celebrated Ode.' Malone's Shakespeare, xv. 344. 'Cradock records (Memoirs, i. 230) that Goldsmith said to him :'You are so attached to Hurd, Gray, and Mason, that you think nothing good can proceed but out of that formal school;-now, I'll mend Gray's Elegy by leaving out an idle word in every line. 'The curfew tolls the knell of day, The lowing herd winds o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his way, And-" Enough, enough, I have no ear for more.' to 468 Boswell opens his mind. [A.D. 1763. to the merit of that bard, and had been actuated by envy. Alas! ye little short-sighted criticks, could JOHNSON be envious of the talents of any of his contemporaries? That his opinion on this subject was what in private and in publick he uniformly expressed, regardless of what others might think, we may wonder, and perhaps regret; but it is shallow and unjust to charge him with expressing what he did not think. Finding him in a placid humour, and wishing to avail myself of the opportunity which I fortunately had of consulting a sage, to hear whose wisdom, I conceived in the ardour of youthful imagination, that men filled with a noble enthusiasm for intellectual improvement would gladly have resorted from distant lands;-I opened my mind to him ingenuously, and gave him a little sketch of my life, to which he was pleased to listen with great attention'. I acknowledged, that though educated very strictly in the principles of religion, I had for some time been misled into a certain degree of infidelity; but that I was come now to a better way of thinking, and was fully satisfied of the truth of the Christian revelation, though I was not clear as to every point considered to be orthodox. Being at all times a curious examiner of the human mind, and pleased with an undisguised display of what had passed in it, he called to me with warmth, 'Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.' He then began to descant upon the force of testimony, and the little we could know of final causes; so that the objections of, why was it so? or why was it not so? ought not to disturb us: adding, that he himself had at one period been guilty of a temporary neglect of religion, but that it was not the result of argument, but mere absence of thought'. After having given credit to reports of his bigotry, I was 'So, less than two years later, Boswell opened his mind to Paoli. 'My time passed here in the most agreeable manner. I enjoyed a sort of luxury of noble sentiment. Paoli became more affable with me. I made myself known to him.' Boswell's Corsica, p. 167. 2 See ante, p. 78. agreeably Aetat. 54.] The differences of Christians. 469 agreeably surprized when he expressed the following very liberal sentiment, which has the additional value of obviating an objection to our holy religion, founded upon the discordant tenets of Christians themselves: For my part, Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious'.' We talked of belief in ghosts. He said, 'Sir, I make a distinction between what a man may experience by the mere strength of his imagination, and what imagination cannot possibly produce. Thus, suppose I should think that I saw a form, and heard a voice cry "Johnson, you are a very wicked fellow, and unless you repent you will certainly be punished;" my own unworthiness is so deeply impressed upon my mind, that I might imagine I thus saw and heard, and therefore I should not believe that an external communication had been made to me. But if a form should appear, and a voice should tell me that a particular man had died at a particular place, and a particular hour, a fact which I had no apprehension of, nor any means of knowing, and this fact, with all its circumstances, should afterwards be unquestionably proved, I should, in that case, be persuaded that I had supernatural intelligence imparted to me.' Here it is proper, once for all, to give a true and fair statement of Johnson's way of thinking upon the question, whether departed spirits are ever permitted to appear in this world, or in any way to operate upon human life. He has been ignorantly misrepresented as weakly credulous upon that subject; and, therefore, though I feel an inclination to disdain and treat with silent contempt so foolish a notion concerning my illustrious friend, yet as I find it has gained ground, it is necessary to refute it. The real fact then is, that Johnson had a very philosophical mind, and such a rational respect for testimony, as to make him submit his understanding to what was authentically proved, though he could not comprehend why it was so. Being thus disposed, 1 See post, Sept. 22, 1777. he 470 The Cock-lane Ghost. [A.D. 1763. he was willing to inquire into the truth of any relation of supernatural agency, a general belief of which has prevailed in all nations and ages'. But so far was he from being the dupe of implicit faith, that he examined the matter with a jealous attention, and no man was more ready to refute its falsehood when he had discovered it. Churchill, in his poem entitled The Ghost, availed himself of the absurd credulity imputed to Johnson, and drew a caricature of him under the name of 'POMPOSO',' representing him as one of the believers of the story of a Ghost in Cock-lane, which, in the year 1762, had gained very general credit in London'. Many of my readers, I am convinced, are to this hour under an impression that Johnson was thus foolishly deceived. It will therefore surprise them a good deal when they are informed upon undoubted authority, that Johnson was one of those by whom the imposture was detected. The story had become so popular, that he thought it should be investigated'; and in this research he was assisted by the 1 See post, March 30, 1778, where in speaking of the appearance of spirits after death he says:-'All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.' See also ante, p. 397, and post, April 15, 1778, under May 4, 1779, April 15, 1781, and June 12, 1784. The caricature begins:— 'Pomposo, insolent and loud, Vain idol of a scribbling crowd, Whose very name inspires an awe, Whose ev'ry word is Sense and Law.' Churchill's Poems, i. 216. 'The chief impostor, a man of the name of Parsons, had, it should seem, set his daughter to play the part of the ghost in order to pay out a grudge against a man who had sued him for a debt. The ghost was made to accuse this man of poisoning his sister-in-law, and to declare that she should only be at ease in her mind if he were hanged. 'When Parsons stood on the Pillory at the end of Cock Lane, instead of being pelted, he had money given him.' Gent. Mag. xxxii. 43, 82, and xxxiii. 144. • Horace Walpole, writing on Feb. 2, 1762 (Letters, iii. 481), says :'I could send you volumes on the Ghost, and I believe, if I were to stay a little, I might send its life, dedicated to my Lord Dartmouth, by the Ordinary of Newgate, its two great patrons. A drunken par Reverend Aetat. 54.] The Cock-lane Ghost. 471 Reverend Dr. Douglas', now Bishop of Salisbury, the great detector of impostures; who informs me, that after the gentlemen who went and examined into the evidence were satisfied of its falsity, Johnson wrote in their presence an account of it, which was published in the newspapers and Gentleman's Magazine, and undeceived the world'. ish clerk set it on foot out of revenge, the Methodists have adopted it, and the whole town of London think of nothing else. ... I went to hear it, for it is not an apparition, but an audition, ... the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, Lord Hertford, and I, all in one Hackney-coach: it rained torrents; yet the lane was full of mob, and the house so full we could not get in.' See post, April 10, 1778. Described by Goldsmith in Retaliation as 'The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks.' See ante, p. 265. 'The account was as follows:-'On the night of the 1st of February [1762] many gentlemen eminent for their rank and character were, by the invitation of the Reverend Mr. Aldrich, of Clerkenwell, assembled at his house, for the examination of the noises supposed to be made by a departed spirit, for the detection of some enormous crime. 'About ten at night the gentlemen met in the chamber in which the girl, supposed to be disturbed by a spirit, had, with proper caution, been put to bed by several ladies. They sat rather more than an hour, and hearing nothing, went down stairs, when they interrogated the father of the girl, who denied, in the strongest terms, any knowledge or belief of fraud. The supposed spirit had before publickly promised, by an affirmative knock, that it would attend one of the gentlemen into the vault under the Church of St. John, Clerkenwell, where the body is deposited, and give a token of her presence there, by a knock upon her coffin; it was therefore determined to make this trial of the existence or veracity of the supposed spirit. While they were enquiring and deliberating, they were summoned into the girl's chamber by some ladies who were near her bed, and who had heard knocks and scratches. When the gentlemen entered, the girl declared that she felt the spirit like a mouse upon her back, and was required to hold her hands out of bed. From that time, though the spirit was very solemnly required to manifest its existence by appearance, by impression on the hand or body of any present, by scratches, knocks, or any other agency, no evidence of any preter-natural power was exhibited. Our |