266 Recollections of Dr. Johnson
he related to me himself, laughing heartily at the conceit of Dr. Grainger's refractory Muse ! Where it happen'd I do not know, but I am certain, very certain, that it was not, as Mr. Boswell asserts, at Sir Joshua Reynolds's 1 , for they were not, I believe, even personally known to each other.
But some very beautiful lines out of another Poem, by the same Author, I have often heard him repeat, and express great admiration of them.
1 Solitude, romantick maid, Whether by nodding towers you tread; Or haunt the desert's trackless gloom, Or hover o'er the yawning t.omb ; Or climb the Andes' clifted side, Or by the Nile's coy source abide ; Or, starting from your half year's sleep, From Hecla view the thawing deep ; Or at the purple dawn of day, Tadmor's marble waste survey 2 .'
I shall never forget the concordance of the sound of his voice, with the grandeur of those images 3 ; nor indeed for the same reason the gothick 4 dignity of his Aspect, his look and manner, when repeating sublime passages.
But what was very remarkable, though his cadence in reading poetry was so judiciously emphatical as to give a double force to the words he utter'd, yet in reading prose, particularly common and familiar subjects, narrations, essays, letters, &c., nothing could be more injudicious than his manner, beginning every period with a pompous accent, and reading it with a whine, or with a kind of spasmodic struggle for utterance ; and this, not from any natural infirmity, but from a strange singularity, in
of gentle manners you have said bourne, and observed : ' This, Sir, is
enough.'" Life, iv. 28. very noble.' Id. iii. 197.
1 Life, ii. 453. See ib. ii. 454, n. 2, 3 After 'images' Miss Reynolds where Johnson said: 'Percy, Sir, had at first written : ' Nor indeed for was angry with me for laughing at The this same reason the sublime pleasure Sugar-Cane ; for he had a mind to I have received on hearing him read make a great thing of Grainger's some passages out of Homer.' rats.' 4 She means, I think, 'the rude
2 He repeated these lines at Ash- dignity.' See ante, i. 478.
reading
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