Johnson in the Green Room.

(Vol. i, p. 201.)

Mr. Richard Herne Shepherd, in Watford’s Antiquarian for January, 1887, p. 34, asserts that the actual words which Johnson used when he told Garrick that he would no longer frequent his Green Room were indecent; so indecent that Mr. Shepherd can only venture to satisfy those whom he calls students by informing them of them privately.  For proof of this charge against the man whose boast it was that ’obscenity had always been repressed in his company’ (ante, iv. 295) he brings forward John Wilkes.  The story, indeed, as it is told by Boswell, is not too trustworthy, for he had it through Hume from Garrick.  As it reaches Mr. Shepherd it comes from Garrick through Wilkes.  Garrick, no doubt, as Johnson says (ante, v. 391), was, as a companion, ’restrained by some principle,’ and had ‘some delicacy of feeling.’  Nevertheless, in his stories, he was, we may be sure, no more on oath than a man is in lapidary inscriptions (ante, ii. 407).  It is possible that he reported Johnson’s very words to Hume, and that Hume did not change them in reporting them to Boswell.  Whatever they were, they were spoken in 1749 and published in 1791, when Johnson had been dead six years, Garrick twelve years, and Hume fourteen years.  It is idle to dream that they can now be conjecturally emended.  But it is worse than idle to bring in as evidence John Wilkes.  What entered his ear as purity itself might issue from his mouth as the grossest obscenity.  He had no delicacy of feeling.  No principle restrained him.  When he comes to bear testimony, and aims a shaft at any man’s character, the bow that he draws is drawn with the weakness of the hand of a worn-out and shameless profligate.

Mr. Shepherd quotes an unpublished letter of Boswell to Wilkes, dated Rome, April 22, 1765, to show ’that the two men had become familiars, not only long before Wilkes’s famous meeting with Dr. Johnson was brought about, but before even the friendship of Boswell himself with Johnson had been consolidated.’  It needs no unpublished letters to show that.  It must be known to every attentive reader of Boswell.  See ante, i. 395, and ii. 11.

Frederick III, King of Prussia.

(Vol. i, p. 308.)

Boswell should have written Frederick II.

Boswell’s visit to Rousseau and Voltaire.

(Vol. i, p. 434; and vol. ii, p. 11.)

Boswell to Andrew Mitchell, Esq., His Britannic Majesty’s Minister at Berlin.

’Berlin, 28 August, 1764.