James Boswell

“ Lauder confesses his guilt in a letter to Doctor Douglas, and takes all the obloquy on himself; but in a subsequent letter he declares, that the penitential one was written for him by that very gentleman, who has since written the life of Milton, and makes some complaints of a breach of friendship, in which he had placed the most implicit and unlimited confidence; but as he never charged, that I know of, the writer of Milton’s life with any participation in the forgery, we impute to him nothing but a strange malignity which darkened his understanding. ”

“ I do not, however, believe that the writer of Milton’s life was in the secret of Lauder’s forgeries, the fact itself being of so extraordinary a nature, that it is not probable that any two persons, separately capable of committing it, should so fortuitously meet together ”

“ If there is any harshness in this note, let it be remembered, that it speaks of a man who, in the instance mentioned, let loose the most outrageous malignity against one, who, whatever political errors he might have imbibed in common with a great majority of the nation, was, however, as a private man, of so exemplary a virtue, as to do the highest honour to literary pursuit, and whose genius, as a poet, conferred celebrity on the nation itself, and in whose protection therefore we ought to have taken a greater share. ”

“ The pretensions of Alexander were of a bolder and more rational sort, and held to be so important, that his successors, who had no kindred interest in the horns of Ammon, yet mingled them in their crowns and tiaras, till at last the Roman Titans tumbled from their seats one after another these fictitious gods. The most deceitful glimmer of divine claim seems to have had more influence on the mind of the person who seems to have been designated in the text, than the most solid principles of political right. ”

“ A dun is a bore, and a sermon is a bore, and so forth; but the greatest of all possible bores, in whatever spelling, is a husband, a bore at night, a bore in the morning, and, in short, one general universal bore. ”

“ That the person here designated should carry out of this scene any respectability of character, is a proof that either he must have possessed great intrinsic worth, who could bear such large deductions, or that public opinion has ceased to be the test of merit, if any base metal can in this manner pass current for gold. ”

“ Where he insults therefore the mighty dead, his rage is at least natural; and when, to wound Pope, he suborns the tongue of a * kitchen wench, he preserves, however, a nice proportion between his end and his means, doing, with very singular propriety, the basest thing in, what must be allowed to be, the lowest way. But we abstain, we affect not gravity, we even forget his almost felonious attack upon Milton, and proceed. We have already noted the facility with which [ 19 ] our learned Pig could say Ay. ”

“ Talking of Granger—“The dog is a Whig: I do not like much to see a Whig in any dress; but I hate to see a Whig in a parson’s gown.”—Ibid. p. 312.
There needed no more; a pension was immediately hung about his neck, and the letters L. L. D. soon afterwards impressed on his rump *. And now who but our Pig? lying in the sun, cheek by jowl, by the great ministerial Hog, routing in the political soil, and throwing up daily the most delicious [ 16 ] pig-nuts with his snout ”