and took all possible care that his understanding should not be deranged 1 . Orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano 2 . When his knowledge from books, and he knew all that books could tell him 3 , is considered ; when his compositions in verse and prose are enumerated to the reader (and a complete list of them wherever dispersed is desirable 4 ) it must appear extra ordinary he could abstract himself so much from his feelings, and that he could pursue with ardour the plan he laid down of establishing a great reputation. Accumulating learning (and the example of Barretier, whose life he wrote 5 ) shewed him how to arrive at all science. His imagination often appeared to be too mighty for the control of his reason. In the preface to his Dictionary, he says, that his work was composed * amidst incon venience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.' * I never read this preface,' says Mr. Home 6 , 'but it makes me shed tears/
If this memoir-writer possessed the pen of a Plutarch, and the subject is worthy of that great biographer, he would begin his account from his youth, and continue it to the last period of his life, in the due order of an historian. What he knows and can recollect, he will perform. His father (called ' gentleman ' 7 in the parish register) he says himself, and it is also within memory, was an old bookseller at Lichfield, and a whig in principle 8 . The father of Socrates was not of higher extraction, nor of a more honourable profession. Our author was born in that city ; and the house of his birth was a few months ago visited by a learned
1 Life, i. 64; v. 215 ; ante^ i. 199, though now lost in the indiscriminate
472 ; ii. 322. assumption of Esquire, was commonly
a Juvenal, Satires, x. 356; Life,\v. taken by those who could not boast
401. of gentility.' Life, i. 34.
3 Ante, ii. 214 n. 8 * He was a zealous high-church
4 Ante, i. 304 n. ; Life, i. 16, 1 12. man and royalist, and retained his
5 Life, i. 148 ; Works, vi. 376. attachment to the unfortunate house
6 Better known as Home Tooke. of Stuart, though he reconciled him- Life, i. 297, n. 2 ; ante, i. 405 n. self by casuistical arguments of ex-
7 ' His father is there stiled Gen- pediency and necessity to take the tleman, a circumstance of which an oaths imposed by the prevailing ignorant panegyrist has praised him power.' Jb. i. 36. For Johnson's for not being proud ; when the truth defence of a Jacobite's taking the is, that the appellation of Gentleman, oaths see ib. ii. 322.
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