ticularly relied on two lines which he said Johnson would not have written—
Against the houseless stranger shuts the door.”
Perhaps Johnson would not have used the familiar but forcible expression in the second line; and yet it is not Goldsmith’s, but Shakspeare’s—
Not bear the knife myself.”—Macbeth.
And “houseless” he had from King Lear.
Akenside however, while he pointed out these lines as unlike Johnson’s manner, had not sagacity enough to observe some others which at once discovered his vigorous pen and cast of thought—
Our own felicity we make or find.”
Johnson, in fact, wrote about sixteen lines of this beautiful poem, and no more, as he himself told Mr. Boswell.[1] But Akenside never found this out.
Mr. Cator, the money-lender, once speaking about drunkenness, instead of enlarging on the common topics, the universality of it, its obscuring men’s faculties, producing quarrels, &c., observed that it was a most injurious practice, and might be attended with very bad effects; for no man who goes into company and indulges in wine, can know when he may be called out to make a bargain!
- ↑ In this, Malone or Boswell slightly errs. The latter says: “In the year 1783, he (Johnson) at my request marked with a pencil the lines which he had furnished, which are only line 420th: ‘To stop too fearful and too faint to go,’ and the concluding ten lines except the last couplet but one.”
