to enter into this disquisition with that minuteness and precision which it requires."
"Mr Spence observes," says the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine,[1] "that Blacklock's notion of day may comprehend the ideas of warmth, variety of sounds, society, and cheerfulness; and his notion of night, the contrary ideas of dullness, silence, solitude, melancholy, and, occasionally, even of horror: that lie substitutes the idea of glory for that of the sun; and of glory in a less degree for those of the moon and stars: that his idea of the beams of the sun may be composed of this idea of glory, and that of rapidity: that something of solidity, too, may perhaps be admitted both into his idea of light and darkness; but that what his idea of glory is, cannot be determined. Mr Spence also remarks, that Mr Blacklock may attribute paleness to grief, brightness to the eyes, cheerfulness to green, and a glow to gems and roses, without any determinate ideas; as boys at school, when, in their distress for a word to lengthen out a verse, they find purpureus olor, or purpureum mare, may afterwards use the epithet purpureus with propriety, though they know not what it means, and have never seen either a swan or the sea, or heard that the swan is of a light, and the sea of a dark colour. But he supposes, too, that Mr Blacklock may have been able to distinguish colours by his touch, and to have made a new vocabulary to himself, by substituting tangible for visible differences, and giving them the same names; so that green, with him, may seem something pleasing or soft to the touch, and red, something displeasing or rough. In defence of this supposition, it has been said, with some plausibility, that the same disposition of parts in the surfaces of
- ↑ We have already stated our belief that this writer was Dr Johnson. Besides the evidence which the passages quoted in the text afford, there is much of the spirit of Johnson in the summary of Blacklock's personal character: "This gentleman has one excellence which outvalues all genius, and all learning—he is truly and eminently a good man. He possesses great abilities with modesty, and wants almost every thing else with content." The probability is farther heightened by the kindness which Johnson manifested to Blacklock when he visited Scotland. On being introduced at Mr Boswell's, the English moralist "received him with a most humane complacency—'Dear Dr Blacklock, I am glad to see you!'" Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides. We are also told by Mr Boswell,that Dr Johnson, on his return from the Western Islands, breakfasted once at Dr Blacklock's house. We esteem the verbal criticism in the article we have just spoken of, as equally characteristic of the illustrious lexicographer: "Some passages," it is remarked, "appear to have something wrong in them at the first view, but upon a more accurate inspection, are found to be right, or at least only to be wrong as they reflect the faults of others. In these verses,
'What cave profound, what star sublime,
Shall hide me from thy boundless view,'there seems to be an improper connexion of ideas; but the impropriety is in a great degree of our own making. We have joined ideas which Mr Blacklock, without any absurdity, has here separated. We have associated the idea of darkness with that of profundity; and a star being, as a luminous body, rather adapted to discover than to hide, we think the cave and the star, with their epithets, improperly opposed in this passage; but Mr Blacklock's, idea included only distance: and as neither height nor depth, in the language of St Paul, can separate good men from the love of God; neither, says Mr Blacklock, can height or depth conceal any being from his sight. And that he did no' here suppose concealment tho effect of obscurity, appears plainly from the epithet boundless, which he has given to that view which he supposes to comprehend all height and depth, or, in other words, universal space. It must, however, be granted, that as height and depth are relative to a middle point, there is no proportion between the depth of a cave and the height of a star.
"There is certainly a mistake in the last line of this couplet:
'So fools their flocks to sanguine wolves resign,
So trust the cunning fox to prune the vine.'But into this mistake he was perhaps led by the impropriety of the common fable of the fox and grapes, which we frequently quote, without reflecting that an inordinate love of grapes is falsely attributed to that animal: when the fox could not reach the grapes, he said they were sour. Blacklock explained this latter passage by saying, "that he alluded to that well-known passage of the Scripture: 'Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes.' Cant. ii. 15."
