there is the following note: 'The authour being ill of the gout:' but Johnson was not attacked with that distemper till at a very late period of his life[1]. May not this, however, be a poetical fiction? Why may not a poet suppose himself to have the gout, as well as suppose himself to be in love, of which we have innumerable instances, and which has been admirably ridiculed by Johnson in his Life of Cowley[2]? I have also some difficulty to believe that he could produce such a group of conceits[3] as appear in the verses to Lyce, in which he claims for this ancient personage as good a right to be assimilated to heaven, as nymphs whom other poets have flattered; he therefore ironically ascribes to her the attributes of the sky, in such stanzas as this:
'Her teeth the night with darkness dies,
She's starr'd with pimples o'er;
Her tongue like nimble lightning plies,
And can with thunder roar.'
But as at a very advanced age he could condescend to trifle in namby-pamby[4] rhymes, to please Mrs. Thrale and her daughter, he may have, in his earlier years, composed such a piece as this.
It is remarkable, that in this first edition of The Winter's Walk, the concluding line is much more Johnsonian than it was afterwards printed; for in subsequent editions, after praying Stella to 'snatch him to her arms,' he says,
'And shield me from the ills of life.'
Whereas in the first edition it is
'And hide me from the sight of life.'
- ↑ See Post under Sept. 18, 1783.
- ↑ See Johnson's Works, vii. 4, 34.
- ↑ Boswell italicises conceits to shew that he is using it in the sense in which Johnson uses it in his criticism of Cowley:—'These conceits Addison calls mixed wit; that is, wit which consists of thoughts true in one sense of the expression and false in the other.' Ib. vii. 35.
- ↑ Namby Pamby was the name given to Ambrose Philips by Pope. Ib. viii. 395.
