which are no longer such. By vulgarism I mean what is unfounded on ratiocination or necessity: for instance underneath. Johnson. Our best writers have used it. Tooke. They have; and wisely; for it has risen up before them in sacred places, and it brings with it serious recollections. It was inscribed on the peasant's grave-stone, long before it shone amid heraldic emblems in the golden lines of Jonson, ushering in "Pembroke's sister, Sydney's mother." Beside, it is significant and euphonious. Either half conveys the full meaning of the whole. But it is silly to argue that we gain ground by shortening on all occasions the syllables of a sentence. Half a minute, if indeed so much is requisite, is well spent in clearness, in fulness, and pleasureableness of expression, and in engaging the ear to carry a message to the understanding. Whilst is another vulgarism which authors have adopted, the last letter being added improperly. While is "the time when"; "whiles "the times when." Johnson. I am inclined to pay little attention to such fastidiousness, nor does it matter a straw whether we use the double e, instead of ete, in sweet, and the other words you recited from good authors. But I now am reminded that near is nigher, by Sir Thomas More writing "never the nere." However, you are not to suppose that I undervalue the authority of Benjamin Jonson. I find sometimes his poetry unsatisfactory and troublesome; but his prose is much better, and now and then almost harmonious; which his verses never are for half a dozen lines together. Tooke. I know little about poetry; but it appears to me that in his, where he has not the ague he has the cramp. Nearly all his thoughts are stolen. The prettiest of his poems, "Drink to me only with thy eyes," is paraphrased from Scaliger's version of Aristanetus. He collected much spoil from his campaign in the Low Countries of Literature. However, his English for the most part is admirable, and was justly looked up to until Milton rose, overshadowing all England, all Italy, and all Greece. Since that great man's departure we have had nothing (in style I mean) at all remarkable. Locke and Defoe were the most purely English: and you yourself, who perhaps may not admire their simplicity, must absolve them from the charge of innovation. I perceive that you prefer the spelling of our gentlemen and ladies now flourishing, to that not only of Middleton but of Milton. Johnson. Before I say a word about either, I shall take the liberty, sir, to reprehend your unreasonable admiration of such writers as Defoe and Locke. What, pray, have they added to the dignity or the affluence of our language? Tooke. I would gladly see our language en riched as far as it can be without depraving it. At present we recur to the Latin and reject the Saxon. This is strengthening our language just as our empire is strengthened, by severing from it the most flourishing of its provinces. In another age we may cut down the branches of the Latin to admit the Saxon to shoot up again: for opposites come perpetually round. But it would be folly to throw away a current and commodious piece of money because of the stamp upon it, or to refuse an accession to an estate because our grandfather could do without it. A book composed of merely Saxon words (if indeed such a thing could be) would only prove the perverseness of the author. It would be inelegant, inharmonious, and deficient in the power of conveying thoughts and images, of which indeed such a writer could have but extremely few at starting. Let the Saxon however be always the groundwork. Johnson. Is Goldsmith plain and simple enough for you? living; but he has faults such as we do not find Tooke. I prefer him to all our writers now in less men, Louth for instance, and Hurd. In he thus terminates a sentence: "Without a friend his Essay on the present State of Polite Literature, to drop a tear on their unattended obsequies." Now what are obsequies but funeral attendance? And surely he is a bad philosopher and a worse his torian who says, "A time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintain'd its man." There never was any such time; and if ever there have more than begun already, are fortunate in should be, we who believe that " England's griefs" being born at the present day. Johnson. He writes more correctly than Middleton; so let him alone. Middleton is not so fidel, sir, and, what is worse, a scoffer. correct a writer as you fancy. He was an in He wants the sweetness of Pope and Addison, the raciness of Dryden and Cowley, the compression of Swift and Hobbes, the propriety and justness and elevation of Barrow, the winning warmth and affectionate soul of Jeremy Taylor, the terseness of Junius, the vivacity of Burke, clinging to a new idea like a woodbine to a young tree, till he embraces every part of it and overtops it. Tooke. I was apprehensive of your insisting that we have nothing so classical in our language as the Life of Cicero; for such, I understand, is the opinion of our scholars at the Universities. I have detected many inaccuracies in Middleton; not in his reasonings and conclusions, for in these he is clear and strong, but in expression. He says in his Letter from Rome, "The temple of some heathen deity or that of the Paphian Venus," as if the Paphian Venus was not a heathen deity. " Popery, which abounds with instances of the grossest forgeries both of saints and reliques, which have been imposed for genuine, &c." To have been forgeries, they must have been imposed for genuine here is also a confusion in the repetition of which, relating to two subjects; as again, "The prejudices which the authority of so celebrated a writer may probably inject to the disadvantage of my argument, which, &c.” Johnson. If Warburton had been as discerning in language as he was acute in argument, he would have exposed to ridicule the expression, 'inject a prejudice." Tooke. His acuteness seems usually to have forsaken him the moment he lost his malignity. As some beasts muddy the water by tramping it before they drink, so nothing is palatable to Warburton but what he has made turbid. Nothing is weaker than his argument on this question, nothing more inelegant than his phraseology. In another place he writes "denounced" for "announced." Our pugnacious bishop, although he defended the divine legation of Moses, would have driven the chariot of Pharaoh against him into the Red Sea. He says, in reference to Middleton, "How many able writers have employed their time and learning to prove Christian Rome to have borrowed their superstitions from the pagan city?" He means her superstitions, and not the superstitions of the able writers, which the words, as they stand, designate. He surely could not dissent from Middleton, with whom nearly all the papists agree, drawing however far different inferences. Johnson. On this ground I go with Middleton: he states a historical fact: he states a thing visible but while he pretends to approach Religion for the sake of looking at her dress, he stabs her. Come, sir! come, sir! philology rather than this! Tooke. A little more then of philology: but first, let me suggest to you that no stab, my good Doctor, can inflict a dangerous wound on Truth. Homer had probably the design of impressing some such sentiment, when he said that gashes in celestial bodies soon unite again. If you have ever had the curiosity to attend a course of lectures on chemistry, or have resided in the house of any friend who cultivates it, you may perhaps have observed how a single drop of colourless liquid, poured on another equally colourless, raises a sudden cloud and precipitates it to the bottom: so, unsuspected falsehood, taken up as pure and limpid, is thrown into a turbid state by a drop; and it does not follow that the drop must be of poison. Johnson. I shall be gratified, sir, by hearing them; and much more than by dissertations, however rich and luminous, on his character and genius, which prove nothing else to me than the abilities of the dissertator. Tooke. I will begin them with his orthography. He writes constantly intire, onely, florish, embassador, inquire, genuin, tribun, troublesom, chast, hast for haste, wast for waste. Johnson. Pronouncing the three last as the common people do universally, and as others beside the common people do in his native county, Yorkshire. I approve of the five first; I disapprove of the rest. Tooke. We who condemn the elision of the final e in these words, in which the pronunciation requires it, elide it where it must likewise be pronounced. Our better authors in a wiser age never wrote find, mind, kind, blind, without the final vowel. Johnson. It is wonderful we ever should have consented to part with it, having once had it, and knowing its use. He writes Tooke. To return to Middleton. battel, sepulcher, luster, theater. Johnson. I do not blame him. "Milton, and most of our best scholars, have done the same. Addison saw at Verona the famous theater. Tooke. He writes the verb rebell with a single 1. Johnson. The fault must surely be the printer's; and yet several final consonants have lately been omitted in our verbs, either by the ignorance and indifference of the writer, or by the unrebuked self-sufficiency of the compositor. I was unaware that the corruption began so early, and with a scholar. Tooke. He writes grandor in preference to grandeur; the only word of the kind which we persist in writing as the French do. Their honneur and faveur are domesticated with us and invested with our livery, while the starveling grandeur is left alone like a swallow on the housetop, when all the others have flown away. Grandor sounds more largely and fully than that puny offspring of the projected jaw. The authority of Milton, were there no other and better, ought to eliminate so ungainly an anomaly: for liqueur is not yet Englished. Johnson. No, sir! we have dram. But whatever we would be ashamed of expressing in English, we call in French. I wish it were possible on all occasions to render the services we owe to criticism, without the appearance of detracting from established or from rising reputations. Since however the judicious eritic will animadvert on none whose glory can be materially injured by his strictures, on none whose excellence is not so great and so well-written with a double o, instead of ou, why should founded that his faults in the comparison are light not the others? and few, the labour is to be endured with patience. Tooke. Of the three words soup, group, troop, borrowed from the French, there is only one which we have fairly naturalised. If troop is Johnson. Why, indeed? it? correcting an anomaly so easily. He con For it is only by this process that we can go Tooke. Creature has only two syllables, creator on from what is good to what is perfect. I am three. Why not write creture, as we pronounce in the habit of noting down the peculiarities of every book I read; and, knowing that I was to meet you here, I have placed in the fold of my sleeve such as I once collected out of Middleton. Now to go on again with Middleton. fuses born and borne, which indeed are of the same origin, but differently spelt in their different significations. As these two participles are the same, so are the two substantives flower and flour; | and (I will add) considerate and elegant writers, which we may see the more plainly by removing excepting red, to which two unnecessary letters them a little out of our own language, and placing them at the side of a cognate word in another. An academy of Tuscany, still in existence I think, entitled Della Crusca, chose for its emblem a sieve, and for its motto, Il più bel fior ne coglie. Johnson. True enough: and now indeed I perceive the reason, indifferently versed as I am in the Italian language, why the members of that academy have been universally called, of late years, coglioni. Tooke. Whenever I hear a gentleman addressed by that title, I shall bow to him as to a personage of high distinction, if I should travel at any time so far as Florence. Johnson. Rightly judged, sir! A coglione in all countries is treated (I doubt not) with deference and respect. Tooke. Middleton writes clame, proclame, exclame; I think properly; as pretense and defense. He never uses the word boast, but brag instead of it; and the word ugly, in itself not elegant, most inelegantly. "There are many ugly reports about him," "which Cicero calls an ugly blow," "an ugly precedent," " an ugly disturbance broke out." He uses proper too as only the vulgar do. "Cicero never speaks of him with respect, nor of his government but as of a proper tyranny." "A proper apotheosis." Johnson. I did not imagine him to be so little choice in his expressions; you have collected a number that quite astonishes me. were added; of these the last has been rejected by universal consent. The double d was retained to distinguish the preterite of the verb from the adjective red: but the sense alone would always do that. Some other words are without the same advantage. We frequently find the adverb still, where it is doubtful whether it is an adverb or an adjective: for which reason, as well as for analogy, I would write stil. We write until, and should, as you have done, write til. In the same preface you inform us that" our language has been exposed to the corruptions of ignorance and the caprices of innovation." This is true, and to an extent which few men have the organs to see clearly. You commend the spelling of highth by Milton; and at the same time you are reluctant to correct our worst anomalies, declaring your unwillingness to "disturb upon narrow views, or for minute propriety, the orthography of our fathers." But if our fathers were licentious, and encroached on the patrimony of our grandfathers, what is to be done? Would it not be well to recover, by any obvious and honest means, as much as may be? If my father was a hair-dresser, and chatted agreeably but wrote vilely, would it not be better to imitate my grandfather, who was a curate, and who spoke with seriousness and wrote with precision? Johnson. Perhaps you are right. I have had my fling at Middleton; now take yours again. Tooke. Do you prefer a Gallicism or a Latinism? However, you shall have both. "Not obnoxious to Clodius's law," for not amenable, liable, or subject. Then "he dresses up in a clear and agreeable style:" then he goes on to "depreciate a name, so highly revered for its patriotism, and whose writings, &c." Now in what school-room was a name ever taught to write. "The senate had no stomach to meddle with an affair so delicate." Johnson. The delicacy of a thing in general is no reason why the stomach is disinclined to meddle with it. Tooke. "An oath which Cato himself, though he had publicly declared that he would never do it, was forced at last to swallow. He had digested many things against his will." Johnson. He might have swallowed them against his will, but surely he must have been the more glad at having digested them in proportion to their hardness. If he digested them against his will, the digestion could not have been forced nor difficult. The evil is, when we have the will and can not do it! But I hope we may now leave the dining-room. Tooke. In Middleton's time it was usual to call Cicero by the familiar name of Tully, and we continue to say Tully's Offices. A mere Englishman, and only to such should we think we are speaking when we speak in English, would never comprehend the meaning of the title. Johnson. Why not call the book Cicero on Moral Obligations, or, in one word, on Duties? Tooke. It might deceive some purchasers, on seeing only the title-page. Duties, in our days, signify taxes. Whenever we talk of the duties simply and solely, the taxes are understood: these being the only duties which statesmen inculcate on the people. The Roman names have fared among us worse than the Greek. Several retain their full proportions. Mark Antony has no Roman feature such a name is more applicable to an English coal-heaver or mackerel-crier than to the great orator or the celebrated triumvir. Johnson. In a translation from the Latin, wherever the Romans are introduced as speakers, I should think it more dignified to pronounce the names at full. I would not offer my money in a clipped and sweated state. Tooke. We retain the folly of turning the Greeks into Romans, and ending in us what ought to end in os; as Anytus and Melitus. This is absurder than naturalising them at once. Are you inclined to look again at the coarseness and clumsiness of Middleton? Johnson. Drag him out, by all means. Johnson. Poetry alone has this privilege. Johnson. Much better without both which and Tooke. He uses the superlative freest. Johnson. Properly the word free has no compara- 66 Tooke. A scholar, as he was, should never Tooke. "I did not take him to be a rascal." "Such Arpinum," he says, clauses were only bugbears." "The occasion was have countenanced the sentence of Valerius so pat." "Shall I do it, says I, in my own way?" Maximus on Marius. "had the singular felicity to produce the most and two lines lower, "I will move the senate then, says I;" and three after, "So I thought, glorious contemner, as well as the most illustrious "Cross the improver, of the arts and eloquence." A singular says I." Cicero is the speaker! Tyber" for across. "I had rather have him the kind of felicity indeed! If this glory had had its comrade of Romulus than of the goddess Safety." followers, the greater part of the world would at "To try what fortunes he could carve for him- this time have been a forest. He places strange self." "He seems to be hard put to it, for a and discordant ideas in close apposition. Speak"Dressing of Sylla, he says, "He employed himself parpretext." "Part with without regret." "If any other fate ticularly in reforming the disorders of the state, by ing up an impeachment." They would submit their conduct to putting his new laws in execution, and in distriexpect me." the judgment of Cato, and deposit four thousand buting the confiscated lands of the adverse party among his legions: so that the republic seemed pounds apiece in his hands." to be once more seated on a legal basis, and the laws and judicial proceedings began to flourish in the forum." Confiscation is a pretty legal basis, no doubt. Here he brings me to the Rostra. Rostra must be plural: I wonder he wrote "that rostra." There is an idle and silly thought in the Preface. Romulus, he tells you, seems to have borrowed the plan of his new state from the old government of Athens, as it was instituted by Theseus. What could Romulus know of Theseus or of Athens? The people were in the same state of civilisation, had the same wants, and satisfied them alike. Romulus borrowed the houses, harvests, and wives, of those near him: he borrowed no more from Athens than from 'Change-Alley. The laws of Solon were known to Numa first among the Romans, if indeed Numa was a Roman, and not rather a Corinthian. The name seems fictitious. Johnson. Apiece, although Hooker has once applied the expression to men, ought never in such cases to be used instead of each. Its proper sense is of things saleable, inert or alive, but rather of the inert. Tooke. In that case it might do very well for I find in most writers the his senate or ours. word each used indiscriminately for every: this is wrong in prose: each ought never to be employed but in reference to persons or things mentioned before. Johnson. I never heard that. Tooke. It may be wrong; consider it. Middleton translates the word innocens, which, when spoken of military men, signifies their forbearance and moderation, into innocent, a term quite ridiculous when thus applied in English. In Cato's letter to Cicero, about his intended triumph, we find it thrice. "Young Cæsar flowed from the "What flows from the source of my counsels." result." Johnson. False metaphor ! Johnson. Leave politics alone: let history lie quiet. What I remarked, some time since, on comparatives and superlatives, makes me desirous that we had a collection of Latin and English comparatives, the former terminating in the masculine and feminine by ior, the latter in er. It would show us at a glance to what words the Roman writers, and our own, thought it better to prefix magis and more, instead of the comparative by the termination; and we should see, what never occurred to me until now, that the ancient and elegant chose the simpler mode preferably. Middleton, whom you have been quoting and examining so attentively, writes, honester, modester: Milton virtuousest. Tooke. With all my veneration for this extraordinary and exemplary man, I would never use the word; and with all the preference I give, whenever it can be given, to the comparative formed by the final syllable, I never would admit it, nor the superlative, in words ending with ous: such as virtuous, pious, religious. Johnson. Nor I truly: but perhaps our contemporaries are somewhat too abstemious in words to which it might be more gracefully adapted. Tooke. Middleton writes "for good and all." This is somewhat in the manner of your friend Edmund Burke, who uses the word anotherguess ; in which expression are both vulgarity and ignorance the real term is another-guise: there is nothing of guessing. Beside another-guise we have another-gates. "When Hudibras about to enter Upon anothergates adventure," &c. Johnson. Edmund Burke, sir, is so violent a reformer that I am confident he will die a Tory. I am surprised that anything he does or says should encounter your disapprobation. He, sir, and Junius should have been your favourites, if indeed they are not one and the same: for Edmund writes better when he writes for another, and any character suits him rather than his own. Shenstone, when he forgot his Strephons and Corydons and followed Spenser, became a poet. Your old antagonist Junius wears an elegant sword-knot, and swaggers bravely. What think you? Tooke. His words are always elegant, his sentences always sonorous, his attacks always vigorous, and rarely (although I may be a sufferer by admitting it) misplaced. However, those only can be called great writers, who bring to bear on their subject more than a few high faculties of the mind. I require in him whom I am to acknowledge for such, accuracy of perception, variety of mood, of manner, and of cadence; imagination, reflection, force, sweetness, copiousness, depth, perspicuity. I require in him a princely negligence of little things, and a proof that although he seizes much, he leaves much (alike within his reach) unappropriated and untouched. Let me see nothing too trim, nothing quite incondite. Equal solicitude is not to be exerted upon all ideas; some are brought into the fulness of light, some are adumbrated: so on the beautiful plant of our conservatories, a part is in fruit, a part in blossom; not a branch is leafless, not a spray is naked. Then come those graces and allurements, for which we have few and homely names, but which among the ancients had many, and expressive of delight and of divinity, lepores, illecebræ, veneres, &c.: these, like the figures that hold the lamps on staircases, both invite us and show us the way up: for, write as wisely as we may, we cannot fix the minds of men upon our writings unless we take them gently by the ear. Johnson. On this we meet and agree; but you exact too much. You include too many great properties within your stipulations. Tooke. Several of these in Junius were uncalled for; some that would have been welcome were away; and he is hardly a great writer in whom anything that is great is wanting. Johnson. Sometimes even Cicero himself is defective both in ratiocination and in euphony. Tooke. It can not be controverted that, even in this most eloquent author, there are sentences which might be better. Johnson. For instance in the monkish canticle, Bellum autem ita suscipiatur Ut nihil aliud nisi pax quæsita videatur. Tooke. By writing susceptum sit, he would have avoided the censure he has here incurred too justly. Toward the end of his dialogue De Claris Oratoribus, he runs into the tautology, "Hic me dolor tangit; hæc me cura solicitat." Can anything be more self-evident, and therefore more unneces sary to state and insist on, than that those are worthy of friendship in whom there is a reason why they should be our friends! Digni autem sunt amicitiâ, quibus in ipsis inest causa cur diligantur: or indeed much more so, than that old age comes on by degrees; which he expresses in words redundant with the letter s. Sensim sine sensu ætas senescit. And I wish I could think it were free from the ambition of an antithesis, in the sensim sine sensu. Johnson. He is the only Latin prose writer in whom you will find a pentameter. Quid dominus navis? eripietne suum? And I doubt whether in any other the tenses of possum are repeated seven times in about fourteen lines,* as they are here, with several of the same both before and after. Tooke. This pentameter is not his only one. Johnson. Stop there. We write pentameter with the e before the r, and metre inversely. I throw out this fresh bone to you in my largess. Tooke. In the third book De Oratore, where he reproves the fault, he commits it. If you never have remarked the passage, you will wonder at finding both a hexameter and pentameter, and in sequence. Complexi plus multo etiam vidisse videntur Quam quantum nostrorum ingeniorum acies, &c. Milton puts several verses together in his prose. *De Officiis, 1. ii, beginning at the close of the paragraph, "Adde ductus aquarum, &c." |