the character of a most rigid and sanctimonious censurer of the lightest foibles of others. He never lived in any real intimacy with Dr. Johnson, who never opened his heart to him, or had in fact any accurate knowledge of his character.
If the person who erects his own monument has any vulnerable point of character, the experiment is a dangerous one. The following epitaph, affixed about thirty years ago on a tomb which Dr. Cox, Archbishop of Cashell, in Ireland (second son of Lord Chancellor Cox, the historian), had erected in his lifetime to his wife, leaving a vacant space for an inscription on himself, may serve as a caution against challenging in this manner the pen of the satirist:—
Thou ne’er hadst left this ostentatious space,
Nor given thine enemies such ample room,
To tell posterity upon thy tomb,
A truth by friends and foes alike confess’d,
That by this blank thy life is best express’d.
Mr. Gilbert Cooper was the last of the benevolists, or sentimentalists, who were much in vogue between 1750 and 1760, and dealt in general admiration of virtue. They were all tenderness in words; their finer feelings evaporated in the moment of expression, for they had no connection with their practice. He was the person whom, when lamenting most piteously that his son then absent might be ill or even dead, Mr. Fitzherbert so grievously disconcerted by saying, in a growling tone, “Can’t you take a post chaise, and go and see him?” Mr. Boswell has
