CHAP, xil.] 3sTEWS FOR THE CLUB.

society of Paris; let Joseph "Warton describe what he saw
of literature in London. " I dined with Johnson," he
writes to his brother, " who seemed cold and indifferent,
" and scarce said anything to me. Perhaps he has heard
" what I said of his Sh-akspeare. Of all solemn coxcombs,
" Goldsmith is the first; yet sensible; but affects to use
" Johnson's hard words in conversation.* We had a

" having engaged with the latter, who contradicts and quarrels with all mankind
" in order to obtain their admiration. I think both his means and his end below
" such a genius. If I had talents Eke his, I should despise any suffrage below my
" own standard, and should blush to owe any part of my fame to singularities and
" affectations. But great parts seem like high towers erected on high mountains,
'' the more exposed to every wind, and readier to tumble. Charles Townshend
" is blown round the compass; Rousseau insists that the north and south blow at
" the same time ; and Voltaire demolishes the Bible to erect fatalism in its stead,
"So compatible are the greatest abilities and greatest absurdities !" Gray's anti-
cipations were not less shrewd.

* This charge, which the not very lively Joe Warton (see post, Book iv. chap, iv.)
brings against Goldsmith, of affecting to use Johnson's hard words in conversation,
is one which Hawkins also brings against him ("He affected Johnson's style and
'' manner of conversation, and, when he had uttered, as he often would, a laboured
" sentence, so tumid as to be scarce intelligible, would ask, if that was not truly
" Johnsonian?" lafe of Johnson, 416); and which Boswell has not omitted ("To
"me and many others it appeared that he studiously copied the manner of
"Johnson, though indeed upon a smaller scale," ii. 189). It is however to be
remarked that the same thing is found said so often, and of so many other people,
as for the most part to lose its distinctive or pertinent character. Of Boswell
himself it is undoubtedly far more certain than of Goldsmith, that he was ludicrous
for this kind of imitation of Johnson. Walpole laughs at him for it; Madame
D'Arblay highly colours all its most comical incidents ; and above all we see it in
the conversations of his own wonderful book,—so that when he proceeds to turn the
laugh on Johnson's landlord, little Allen the printer of Bolt-court, for "imitating
'' the stately periods and slow and solemn utterance of the great man" (vii. 106), and
on another occasion professes himself '' not a little amused by observing Allen
" perpetually struggling to talk in the manner of Johnson, like the little frog in
" the fable blowing himself up to resemble the stately ox" (viii. 68-9)—the effect
is amazingly absurd. On the whole, though I think it by no means unlikely that
Goldsmith, as well as others who looked up to Johnson, may have fallen now and
then into unconscious Johnsonianisms, I am disposed to regard Joe Warton's charge
as a sort of falling in with a fashionable cant, in vogue more or less against all with
whom Johnson was familiar. It is at least indisputable that no trace of the absurd
imitation alleged is discoverable, as a habit, in Boswell's reports of Goldsmith's
conversations; where, if it existed at all, that reporter must surely have revealed it
who was too truthful to suppress his own, and where indeed one might fairly
expect to have found it even somewhat exaggerated. of" London is at the first rather awkward—timetes Desmoulins, and does not love Williams. Desmoulins