[686] ‘The shame is to impose words for ideas upon ourselves or others.’  Johnson’s Works, vi. 64.  See ante, p.122, where he says:  ’There is a middle state of mind between conviction and hypocrisy.’  Bacon, in his Essay of Truth, says:  ’It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.’

[687] See ante, p. 204.

[688] ’I dined and lay at Harrison’s, where I was received with that old-fashioned breeding which is at once so honourable and so troublesome.’  Gibbon’s Misc.  Works, i. 144.  Mr. Pleydell, in Guy Mannering, ed. 1860, iv. 96, says:  ’You’ll excuse my old-fashioned importunity.  I was born in a time when a Scotchman was thought inhospitable if he left a guest alone a moment, except when he slept.’

[689] See ante, ii. 167.

[690] See ante, i. 387.

[691] In Johnson’s Works, ed. 1787, xi. 197, it is recorded that Johnson said, ’Sheridan’s writings on elocution were a continual renovation of hope, and an unvaried succession of disappointments.’  According to the Gent.  Mag. 1785, p. 288, he continued:—­’If we should have a bad harvest this year, Mr. Sheridan would say:—­“It was owing to the neglect of oratory."’ See ante, p. 206.

[692] Burke, no doubt, was this ‘bottomless Whig.’  When Johnson said ’so they all are now,’ he was perhaps thinking of the Coalition Ministry in which Lord North and his friends had places.

[693] No doubt Burke, who was Paymaster of the Forces.  He is Boswell’s ‘eminent friend.’  See ante ii.222, and post, Dec. 24, 1783, and Jan.8, 1784.  In these two consecutive paragraphs, though two people seem to be spoken of, yet only one is in reality.

[694] I believe that Burke himself was present part of the time, and that he was the gentleman who ’talked of retiring.  On May 19 and 21 he had in Parliament defended his action in restoring to office two clerks, Powell and Bembridge, who had been dismissed by his predecessor, and he had justified his reforms in the Paymaster’s office.  ‘He awaited,’ he said, the ’judgement of the House. ...If they so far differed in sentiment, he had only to say, Nunc dimittis servum tuum.’  Parl.  Hist. xxiii.919.

[695] A copy of Evelina had been placed in the Bodleian.  ’Johnson says,’ wrote Miss Burney, ’that when he goes to Oxford he will write my name in the books, and my age when I writ them, and then,’ he says, ’the world may know that we So mix our studies, and so joined our fame. For we shall go down hand in hand to posterity.’  Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary, i.429.  The oldest copy of Evelina now in the Bodleian is of an edition published after Johnson’s death.  Miss Burney, in 1793, married General D’Arblay, a French refugee.