laugh one day, because I had received a remarkably fine Stilton cheese as a present from some person who had packed and directed it carefully, but without mentioning whence it came. Mr. Thrale, desirous to know who we were obliged to, asked every friend as they came in, but no body owned it: 'Depend upon it, Sir (says Johnson), it was sent by Junius.'
The False Alarm, his first and favourite pamphlet[1], was written at our house between eight o'clock on Wednesday night and twelve o'clock on Thursday night; we read it to Mr. Thrale when he came very late home from the House of Commons[2]: the other political tracts followed in their order. I have forgotten which contains the stroke at Junius; but shall for ever remember the pleasure it gave him to have written it. It was however in the year 1775 that Mr. Edmund Burke made the famous speech in parliament, that struck even foes with admiration, and friends with delight[3]. Among the nameless thousands who are contented to echo those praises they have not skill to invent, I ventured, before Dr. Johnson himself, to applaud, with rapture, the beautiful passage in it concerning Lord Bathurst and the Angel[4]; which, said our Doctor, had I been in the house, I would have answered thus:
- ↑ 'We talked of his two political pamphlets, The False Alarm, and Thoughts concerning Falkland's Islands. Johnson. "Well, Sir, which of them did you think the best?" Boswell. "I liked the second best." Johnson. "Why, Sir, I liked the first best; and Beattie liked the first best. Sir, there is a subtlety of disquisition in the first, that is worth all the fire of the second."' Life, ii. 147.
- ↑ He was member for Southwark from December, 1765, till the dissolution in 1780. Parl. Hist. xv. 1089; Life, iii. 442.
- ↑ On Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775.
- ↑ Burke, describing 'the growth of our national prosperity' through our trade with America, continues: – 'It has happened within sixty-eight years. There are those alive whose memory might touch the two extremities.
said, "How the arrows of Junius were sure to wound and likely to stick." "Yes, sir," replied Dr. Johnson; yet let us distinguish between the venom of the shaft and the vigour of the bow." At which expression Mr. Hamilton's countenance fell in a manner that to me betrayed the author. Johnson repeated the expression in his next pamphlet – and Junius wrote no more.' Hayward's Piozzi, 2nd ed., i. 106. For Johnson's repetition of this expression see Works, vi. 205. Junius, however, continued to write.
