‘Quintilian,’ Ben Jonson said to Drummond, ‘will tell you your faults, as if he had lived with you.’ Does not the foregoing description embody the experience of many a young Scot, who knows and admires the virtues of his people, and has suffered from them, and dislikes them sometimes even in himself?
The Life of Samuel Boyse, from which I have quoted, gives, like Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage, a vivid picture of the straits to which professional authors were reduced under the rule of Walpole. It is narrated how, about the year 1740, Boyse was brought to the extremity of distress. Having pawned all his clothes he was confined to bed with no other covering but a blanket. ‘He sat up in bed with the blanket wrapt about him, through which he had cut a hole large enough to admit his arm, and placing the paper upon his knee, scribbled in the best manner he could the verses he was obliged to make. Whatever he got by
much that a violent quarrel arose on the subject By the way, it seems to me that Shiells’ Jacobitism has been the only circumstance that has procured him the regard of Mr. Johnson, and the favourable mention that he has made (in the paragraph referred to) of Shiells’ ‘virtuous Life and pious End’—expressions that must draw a smile from every one who knows, as I did, the real character of Robert Shiells. And now, what think you of noticing this matter, in regard to truth and the fair name of the honest bookseller? (Quoted by Croker from the Life of Edmund Cartwright, 1843.)
The notice of Johnson’s Lives in the Monthly Review for December 1781, was almost certainly by Cartwright; it exactly reproduces the statements in Griffiths’ letter. But the earlier pages of the Monthly Review tell a different story. The Companion to the Playhouse (1764) was noticed in the Monthly Review for April 1765. The Companion, speaking of Cibber’s Lives, had said, ‘In this work his own peculiar share was very inconsiderable, many other hands having been concerned with him in it.’ On this the Monthly Review remarks ‘Not many; for excepting the entertaining account of the late Mrs. Chandler of Bath, (which was
