��his character in the latter part of his life. When he was asked whether he had ever mentioned Formosa before him, he said, he was afraid to mention even China.
He thought Cato the best model of tragedy we had z ; yet he used to say, of all things, the most ridiculous would be, to see a girl cry at the representation of it 2 .
He thought the happiest life was that of a man of business, with some literary pursuits for his amusement ; and that in general no one could be virtuous or happy, that was not com pletely employed 3 .
Johnson had read much in the works of Bishop Taylor ; in his Dutch Thomas a Kempis he has quoted him occasionally in the margin 4 .
��1 See ante, i. 185, for Johnson's random talk about authors, and Life, i. 199, n. 2, and Works, vii. 456, for his criticism of Cato in his Life of Addison. In the Preface to his Shakespeare he says (ed. 1765, p. 35) : ' Voltaire expresses his wonder that our authour's extravagancies are endured by a nation which has seen the tragedy of Cato. Let him be answered, that Addison speaks the language of poets and Shakespeare of men. We find in Cato innumerable beauties which enamour us of its authour, but we see nothing that acquaints us with human sentiments or human actions. . . . We pronounce the name of Cato, but we think on Addison.'
' I have always thought that those pompous Roman sentiments are not so difficult to be produced, as is vulgarly imagined. A stroke of nature is worth a hundred such thoughts as "When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,
The post of honour is a private
station."
Cato is a fine dialogue on liberty and the love of one's country.' J. War- ton's Essay on Pope, 2nd ed., i. 259 ;
��Warton published this Essay four teen years before Wordsworth was born.
2 ' A lady observing to one of her maid-servants, when she came in from the play [Hannah More's Fatal Falsehood}, that her eyes looked red, as if she had been crying, the girl, by way of apology, said, "Well, Ma'am, if I did, it was no harm ; a great many respectable people cried too." ' H. More's Memoirs, i. 164.
3 ' That accurate judge of human life, Dr. Johnson, has often been heard by me to observe, that it was the greatest misfortune which could be fall a man to have been bred to no profession, and pathetically to regret that this misfortune was his own.' More's Practical Piety, p. 313. See Life, iii. 309. See ante, i. 238, n. 2, and fast in S e ward's A necdotes.
4 ' In the latter part of his life, in order to satisfy himself whether his mental faculties were impaired, he resolved that he would try to learn a new language, and fixed upon the Low Dutch, for that purpose, and this he continued till he had read about one half of Thomas a Kempis? Life, iv. 21.
He
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