Vulgar words in Life of Johnson, Volume 1 - 1709-1765 (Page 1)
This book at a glance
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No one surely but a 'blockhead,' a 'barren rascal[40],' could with scissors and paste-pot have mangled the biography which of all others is the delight and the boast of the English-speaking world.
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For an _Athenian_ blockhead is the worst of all blockheads[221].'
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Mr. Thomas Warton made this remark to me; and, in support of it, quoted from the poem entitled _The Bastard_, a line, in which the fancied superiority of one 'stamped in Nature's mint with extasy[482],' is contrasted with a regular lawful descendant of some great and ancient family: 'No tenth transmitter of a foolish face[483].'
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One night when Beauclerk and Langton had supped at a tavern in London, and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their heads to go and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on him to join them in a ramble.
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[779]' And when his _Letters_ to his natural son were published, he observed, that 'they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.
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'Colley Cibber[1179], Sir, was by no means a blockhead; but by arrogating to himself too much, he was in danger of losing that degree of estimation to which he was entitled.
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No, Sir, I called the fellow a blockhead[1243] at first, and I will call him a blockhead still.
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[1408] Surely, one ought to sit in a society like ours, 'Unelbow'd by a gamester, pimp, or player[1409].'
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'The boasted liberty we talk of,' he writes, 'is but a mean reward for the long servitude, the many heartaches and terrors to which our childhood is exposed in going through a grammar school.... No one who has gone through what they call a great school but must remember to have seen children of excellent and ingenuous natures (as has afterwards appeared in their manhood); I say no man has passed through this way of education but must have seen an ingenuous creature expiring with shame, with pale looks, beseeching sorrow and silent tears, throw up its honest eyes and kneel or its tender kneeds to an inexorable blockhead to be forgiven the false quantity of a word in making a Latin verse.'
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Bramston, in his _Man of Taste_, has the same thought: 'Sure, of all blockheads, scholars are the worst.'
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Johnson's meaning, however, is, that a scholar who is a blockhead must be the worst of all blockheads, because he is without excusc.
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But Bramston, in the assumed character of an ignorant coxcomb, maintains that _all_ scholars are blockheads on account of their scholarship.
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Johnson in his _London_, in describing 'the blockhead's insults,' while he mentions 'the tattered cloak,' passes over the ript shoe.
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[447] 'There is nothing to tell, dearest lady, but that he was insolent and I beat him, and that he was a blockhead and told of it, which I should never have done....
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[484] '_The Bastard_: A poem, inscribed with all due reverence to Mrs. Bret, once Countess of Macclesfield.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 9,284 ~ ~ ~
From _The Earl of Macclesfield's Case_, it appears that 'Anne, Countess of Macclesfield, under the name of Madam Smith, in Fox Court, near Brook Street, Holborn, was delivered of a male child on the 16th of January, 1696-7, who was baptized on the Monday following, the 18th, and registered by the name of Richard, the son of John Smith, by Mr. Burbridge; and, from the privacy, was supposed by Mr. Burbridge to be "a by-blow or bastard."'
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[506] According to Johnson, she was at Bath when Savage's poem of _The Bastard_ was published.
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'She could not,' he wrote, 'enter the assembly-rooms or cross the walks without being saluted with some lines from _The Bastard_.
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[1243] See _post_, April 6, 1772, where Johnson called Fielding a blockhead.
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Dennis is offended that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire, perhaps, thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is represented as a drunkard.
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He knew that Rome, like every other city, had men of all dispositions; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for that which the senate-house would certainly have afforded him.