��Essay on
��may be seen in a passage in one of that Nobleman's letters to his son (Letter CCXli). * There is a man, whose moral character, deep learning, and superior parts, I acknowledge, admire, and respect ; but whom it is so impossible for me to love, that I am almost in a fever whenever I am in his company. His figure (without being deformed) seems made to disgrace or ridicule the common structure of the human body. His legs and arms are never in the position which, according to the situation of his body, they ought to be in, but constantly employed in committing acts of hostility upon the Graces. He throws any where, but down his throat, whatever he means to drink ; and only mangles what he means .to carve. Inattentive to all the regards of social life, he mistimes or misplaces every thing. He disputes with heat and indiscriminately, mindless of the rank, character, and situation of those with whom he disputes ; absolutely ignorant of the several gradations of familiarity and respect, he is exactly the same to his superiors, his equals, and his inferiors ; and therefore, by a necessary consequence, absurd to two of the three. Is it possible to love such a man ? No. The utmost I can do for him is, to consider him a respectable Hottentot V Such was the idea entertained
��and him ; but that his Lordship's continued neglect was the reason why he resolved to have no con nection with him.' Life, i. 257.
1 I have shewn that it was not of Johnson but of George Lyttelton that Chesterfield was writing. Life, i. 267 ; Dr. Johnson, His Friends and his Critics, p. 214.
'Johnson said to me many years before he published his Preface [to Lyttelton's Poems], " Lord Lyttelton was a worthy good man, but so un gracious that he did not know how to be a Gentleman."' MS. note by Mr. Hussey, in Mr. H. Symonds's copy of the Life.
I do not know when Hottentot first came into common use. Addison, in the Freeholder for Jan. 6, 1716, de scribes how a Hottentot, who had
��been brought to England, and 'in a great measure polished out of his natural barbarity, upon being carried back to the Cape of Good Hope, mixed in a kind of transport with his countrymen, brutalized with them in their habits and manners, and would never again return to his foreign acquaintance.'
Dr. Watts, in the first page of his Logick, published in 1724, says that 'the improvement of reason hath raised the learned and the prudent in the European world almost as much above the Hottentots, and other savages of Africa, as those savages are by nature superior to the birds, the beasts, and the fishes.
Fielding, in Tom Jones (Bk. xvi. ch. 8), describes Lady Bellaston as being ' much better pleased with the
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