[From _Noctes Ambrosianae_, April, 1829]
_North._ I forgot old Sam--a jewel rough set, yet shining like a star,
and though sand-blind by nature, and bigoted by Education, one of the
truly great men of England, and "her men are of men the chief," alike in
the dominions of the understanding, the reason, the passions, and the
imagination. No prig shall ever persuade me that _Rasselas_ is not a
noble performance--in design and execution. Never were the expenses of a
mother's funeral more gloriously defrayed by son, than the funeral of
Samuel Johnson's mother by the price of _Rasselas_, written for the
pious purpose of laying her head decently and honourably in the dust.
_Shepherd._ Ay, that was pittin' literature and genius to a glorious
purpose indeed; and therefore nature and religion smiled on the wark,
and have stamped it with immortality.
_North._ Samuel was seventy years old when he wrote the _Lives of the
Poets_.
_Shepherd._ What a fine old buck! No unlike yoursel'.
_North._ Would it were so! He had his prejudicies, and his partialities,
and his bigotries, and his blindnesses,--but on the same fruit-tree you
see shrivelled pears or apples on the same branch with jargonelles or
golden pippins worthy of paradise. Which would ye show to the
Horticultural Society as a fair specimen of the tree?
_Shepherd._ Good, kit, good--philosophically picturesque. (_Mimicking
the old man's voice and manner._)
_North._ Show me the critique that beats his on Pope, and on Dryden--
nay, even on Milton; and hang me if you may not read his essay on
Shakespeare even after having read Charles Lamb, or heard Coleridge,
with increased admiration of the powers of all three, and of their
insight, through different avenues, and as it might seem almost with
different bodily and mental organs, into Shakespeare's "old exhausted,"
and his "new imagined worlds." He was a critic and a moralist who would
have been wholly wise, had he not been partly--constitutionally insane.
For there is blood in the brain, James--even in the organ--the vital
principle of all our "eagle-winged raptures"; and there was a taint of
the black drop of melancholy in his.
_Shepherd._ Wheesht--wheesht--let us keep aff that subject. All men ever
I knew are mad; and but for that law o' natur, never, never, in this
warld had there been a _Noctes Ambrosianae_.