very degrading in a man's continuing to reside in a family where he enjoyed a life of literary leisure, and was treated as a welcome guest and an esteemed friend.[1]
It would seem that Boswell was, as usual, merely following the Doctor, who said: "Whitehead is but a little man to inscribe verses to players." Here we see Johnson's bile against Garrick showing itself. Whitehead had, as we have seen, dedicated his farce to him, and in some lines to the great actor he had written:
"A nation's taste depends on you,
Perhaps a nation's virtue too;
O, think how glorious 'twere to raise,
A Theatre to virtue's praise,
Where no indignant blush might rise,
Nor wit be taught to plead for vice.
But every young, attentive ear,
Imbibe the precepts living there.
And ev'ry inexperienced breast
There feel its own rude hints exprest,
And wakened by the glowing scene,
Unfold the worth that lurks within."
When Garrick revived "Every Man in his Humour," Whitehead was called on to write a prologue, which is to be found among his works. Garrick had been very successful as Abel Drugger in "The Alchymist," and determined on acting in another of Jonson's plays.
In 1777 Whitehead wrote "The Goat's Beard." After
- ↑ There was no very warm affection between the Doctor and Mason. The latter concludes his Memoir of Whitehead by a sneering parody on the elevated style of the great Dr. Samuel: "Those readers who believe that I do not write immediately under his (namely, the bookseller's) pay, and who may have gathered from what they have already read that I am not so passionately enamoured of Dr. Johnson's biographical manner, as to take that for my model, have only to throw these pages aside, and wait till they are new-written by some one of his numerous disciples who may follow his master's example; and should more anecdotes than I furnish him with be wanting (as was the Doctor's case in his life of Mr. Gray), may make amends for it by those acid eructations of vituperative criticism, which are generated by unconcocted taste, and intellectual indigestion."
