��Anecdotes.
��him x : the critic was driven from one of his performances to the other. At length you must allow me, said the gentleman, that there are strong facts in the account of the Four last Years of Queen Anne : ' Yes surely Sir (replies Johnson), and so there are in the Ordinary of Newgate's account 2 .' This was like the story which Mr. Murphy tells, and Johnson always acknowledged: How Dr. Rose of Chiswick, contending for the preference of Scotch writers over the English, after having set up his authors like nine-pins, while the Doctor kept bowling them down again ; at last, to make sure of victory, he named Ferguson upon Civil Society, and praised the book for being written in a new manner 3 .
- I do not (says Johnson) perceive the value of this new manner ;
it is only like Buckinger, who had no hands, and so wrote with his feet V Of a modern Martial 5 when it came out : ' There are in these verses (says Dr. Johnson) too much folly for madness, I think, and too much madness for folly.' If, however, Mr. John son lamented, that the nearer he approached to his own times, the more enemies he should make, by telling biographical truths
��1 For Johnson's opinion of Swift's style see Life, ii. 191, and Works, viii. 220.
a ' " Surely, Sir, (said Dr. Douglas,) you must allow it has strong facts." JOHNSON : ** Why yes, Sir ; but what is that to the merit of the composi tion ? In the Sessions-paper of the Old Bailey there are strong facts. Housebreaking is a strong fact; robbery is a strong fact ; and murder is a mighty strong fact ; but is great praise due to the historian of those strong facts ? No, Sir. Swift has told what he had to tell distinctly enough, but that is all. He had to count ten, and he has counted it right." ' Life, ii. 65.
3 For Dr. Rose see Letters, ii. 325, n. 4, and for ' an imaginary victory ' obtained by him over Johnson, Life, iv. 1 68 .
Of Dr. Adam Fergusson's Essay on the History of Civil Society Gray
��says : ' His love of Montesquieu and Tacitus has led him into a manner of writing too short-winded and sen tentious.' Mason's Gray, 1807, ii. 223. See also Life, v. 42, n. I, and Bentham's Works, x. 64.
4 Horace Walpole describes a paper as being ' written in a hand as small as Buckinger's, who used to write the Lord's Prayer in the com pass of a silver penny.' P. Cun ningham, in a note on this, says : ' Matthew Buckinger, born 1674, without hands or feet, died 1722. There is a print of him drawn and written by himself, with the book of Psalms engraved on the curls of his large flowing periwig.' Walpole's Letters, iv. 159.
5 By James Elphinston. * His brother-in-law, Strahan, sent him a subscription of fifty pounds, and said he would send him fifty more, if he would not publish.' Life, iii. 258.
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