[971] On May 26, 1791, Walpole wrote of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Letters ix. 3l9):—­’I expected amongst the excommunicated to find myself, but am very gently treated.  I never would be in the least acquainted with Johnson; or, as Boswell calls it, I had not a just value for him; which the biographer imputes to my resentment for the Doctor’s putting bad arguments (purposely out of Jacobitism) into the speeches which he wrote fifty years ago for my father in the Gentleman’s Magazine; which I did not read then, or ever knew Johnson wrote till Johnson died.’  Johnson said of these Debates:—­’I saved appearances tolerably well; but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.’ Ante, i. 504.  ’Lord Holland said that whenever Boswell came into a company where Horace Walpole was, Walpole would throw back his head, purse up his mouth very significantly, and not speak a word while Boswell remained.’ Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie, i. 155.  Walpole (Letters, viii. 44) says:—­’Boswell, that quintessence of busybodies, called on me last week, and was let in, which he should not have been, could I have foreseen it.  After tapping many topics, to which I made as dry answers as an unbribed oracle, he vented his errand.’

[972] Walpole wrote (Letters, vi. 44):—­’If The School for Wives and The Christmas Tale were laid to me, so was The Heroic Espistle.  I could certainly have written the two former, but not the latter.’  See ante, iv. 113.

[973] The title given by Bishop Pearson to his collection of Hales’s Writings is the Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable John Hales of Eaton College, &c.  It was published in 1659.

[974] I Henry IV, act ii. sc. 4.  ’Sir James Mackintosh remembers that, while spending the Christmas of 1793 at Beaconsfield, Mr. Burke said to him, ’Johnson showed more powers of mind in company than in his writings; but he argued only for victory; and when he had neither a paradox to defend, nor an antagonist to crush, he would preface his assent with “Why, no, Sir."’ CROKER.  Croker’s Boswell, p. 768.

[975]

     Search then the ruling passion:  There alone
     The wild are constant, and the cunning known;
     The fool consistent, and the false sincere;
     Priests, princes, women, no dissemblers here.’ 
       Pope, Moral Essays, i. 174.

’The publick pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are counterfeit.’ The Idler, No. 18.

[976] Ante, ii. 241, and iii. 325.

[977] Boswell refers to Cicero’s Treatise on Famous Orators.