Anecdotes.
��of the severe reflections on domestic life in Rasselas, took their source from its author's keen recollections of the time passed in his early years x . Their father Michael died of an inflammatory fever, at the age of seventy-six 2 , as Mr. Johnson told me : their mother at eighty-nine, of a gradual decay. She was slight in her person, he said, and rather below than above the common size. So excellent was her character, and so blameless her life, that when an oppressive neighbour once endeavoured to take from her a little field she possessed, he could persuade no attorney to undertake the cause against a woman so beloved in her narrow circle 3 : and it is this incident he alludes to in the line of his Vanity of Human Wishes, calling her
The general favourite as the general friend.
Nor could any one pay more willing homage to such a character, though she had not been related to him, than did Dr. Johnson on every occasion that offered : his disquisition on Pope's epitaph placed over Mrs. Corbet, is a proof of that preference always given by him to a noiseless life over a bustling one 4 ; for however
No conquest she but o'er herself
desir'd ; No arts essay'd, but not to be
admir'd. Passion and pride were to her soul
unknown, Convinc'd that virtue only is our
own. So unaffected, so compos'd a
mind, So firm, yet soft, so strong, yet
so refin'd, Heav'n as its purest gold by
tortures try'd ; The saint sustain'd it, but the
woman dy'd.'
Johnson, in his criticism on this epitaph, says : ' Domestick virtue, as it is exerted without great occa sions or conspicuous consequences, in an even unnoted tenour, required the genius of Pope to display it in such a manner as might attract re gard and enforce reverence.' Works, viii. 354.
taste
��1 'Domestick discord,' answered the princess, * is not inevitably and fatally necessary; but yet it is not easily avoided. We seldom see that a whole family is virtuous: the good and evil cannot well agree : and the evil can yet less agree with one another : even the virtuous fall some times to variance, when their virtues are of different kinds and tending to extremes.' Rasselas, ch. xxvi.
Admiring the harmony in the Bur- ney family, Johnson wrote : ' Of this consanguineous unanimity I have had never much experience ; but it appears to me one of the great lenitives of life.' Letters, ii. 237.
2 He was seventy-five.
3 Nevertheless Johnson never had a good word for an attorney. Life, ii. 126, . 4.
4 ' Here rests a woman, good with
out pretence,
Blest with plain reason and with sober sense :
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