old Cumberland, who carried the poetic jealousy and irritability farther than any man I ever saw. He was a great flatterer, too, the old rogue. ... A very high-bred man in point of manners in society.' Lockhart's Scott, ed. 1839, viii. 193.
In his Biographical Memoirs (ed. 1834, iii. 227) Scott adds :
- In the little pettish sub-acidify of temper which Cumberland
sometimes exhibited there was more of humorous sadness than of ill-will, either to his critics or his contemporaries. . . . These imperfections detract nothing from the character of the man of worthj the scholar and the gentleman.'
For his jealousy see Letters, ii. 112, 115, 122. His grave in Westminster Abbey is close to Johnson's.
His anecdotes must be received with great distrust. His account of the dinner before the first night of She Stoops to Conquer, at which Johnson took the chair, is so manifestly { a romance' to use Mr. Forster's words that I have not quoted it. See Cumberland's Memoirs, i. 367, and Forster's Goldsmith, ed. 1871, ii. 339.]
��WHO will say that Johnson himself would have been such a champion in literature, such a front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he had not been pressed into the service, and driven on to glory with the bayonet of sharp necessity pointed at his back ? If fortune had turned him into a field of clover, he would have laid down and rolled in it. The mere manual labour of writing would not have allowed his lassitude and love of ease to have taken the pen out of the inkhorn 1 , unless the cravings of
1 c I allow (said Johnson) you may than writing.' Mason's Gray, ii. 25.
have pleasure from writing, after it ' I am,' wrote Hume to Strahan,
is over, if you have written well ; ' perhaps the only author you ever
but you don't go willingly to it knew who gratuitously employed
again.' Life, iv, 219. great industry in correcting a work
' There is not a more painful action of which he has fully alienated
of the mind than invention.' Addison the property.' Letters of Hume to
in The Spectator, No. 487. Strahan, p. 183.
'His ditty sweet Of Pope, Johnson wrote: 'To
He loathed much to write, ne make verses was his first labour,
cared to repeat.' and to mend them was his last. . . .
Castle of Indolence, canto i. stanza 68. He was one of those few whose
' Reading, Mr. Gray has often told labour is their pleasure.' Works,
me, was much more agreeable to him viii. 32 1. See also post, p. 90.
hunger
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