John Courtenay

“ Courtenay's rhapsodizing on the Dictionary, the Rambler, and the Lives of the Poets is conventional. Clearly, he admired the wide scope of Johnson's learning and his ability to communicate his knowledge of men and manners in his writings. But his admiration occasionally betrays him; for instance, in describing the "brilliant school" through which Johnson's influence was perpetuated, he overestimated the extent to which Reynolds, Malone, Burney, Jones, Goldsmith, Steevens, Hawkesworth, and Boswell were indebted to Johnson's writings.15 Usually, however, he was on firmer ground. ”

“ Courtenay became alarmed over Boswell's deepening melancholy, as seen in this passage from his letter to Malone of 22 February 1791: "Poor Boswell is very low, & desperate & ... melancholy mad, feels no spring, no pleasure in existence, & is so perceptibly altered for the worse that it is remarked everywhere. I try all I can to revivify him, but he [turns?] so tiresomely & tediously—for the same cursed trite commonplace topics, about death &c.—that we grow old, and when we are old, we are not young—that I despair of effecting a cure. ”

“ Courtenay was the only writer before Boswell to praise Johnson's Latin verse, a body of poetry virtually ignored by other contemporary [Pg v] biographers and memorialists.16 Furthermore, he employs footnotes skillfully. Though they impede the progress of the poem, they do support poetic statement with factual evidence and explain and amplify certain points made in the verses.
The clearest evidence for the care which Courtenay took with the Review can be found upon examination of his revisions. ”

“ Despite his notoriety as a controversial member of Parliament, as a first-rate wit, and as an intimate friend of Boswell, Courtenay remains a shadowy figure. References to him occur often in the last volumes of Boswell's journal, but few of them are particularly revealing. Courtenay evidently never met Johnson; indeed, the anonymous author of A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to His Four Friends: The Rev. Mr. Strahan. James Boswell, Esq. Mrs. Piozzi. J. Courtenay, Esq. M.P. (1786) censures Courtenay for writing about a man whom he did not know. ”

“ He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have been ever since making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established. ”

“ In times and regions so disjoined from each other, that there can scarcely be imagined any communication of sentiments, either by commerce or tradition, has prevailed a general and uniform expectation of propitiating God by corporal austerities, of anticipating his vengeance by voluntary inflictions, and appeasing his justice by a speedy and cheerful submission to a less penalty when a greater is incurred. ”

“ London, a Satire, and The Vanity of Human Wishes, are both imitations of Juvenal. On the publication of London in 1738, Mr. Pope was so much struck by it, that he desired Mr. Dodsley, his bookseller, to find out the author. Dodsley having sought him in vain for some time, Mr. Pope said, he would very soon be deterré. Afterwards Mr. Richardson the painter found out Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Pope recommended him to Lord Gower. ”

“ Molyneux, the Prince's Secretary, a very inquisitive person, and my very worthy friend, assured me he had at first so great a diffidence in the truth of the fact, and was so little biassed by the other believers, even by the King himself, that he would not be satisfied till he was permitted both to see and feel the rabbet, in that very passage, whence we all come into this world. ”

“ But there was a greater reason for Courtenay's intimacy with Boswell. The period following Johnson's death was for Boswell a time of intense anxiety. By 1786 Courtenay and Edmond Malone had become Boswell's closest confidants. Boswell relished the long walks and the dinners he took with Courtenay. Throughout his journal he confessed to the therapeutic value of Courtenay's company; "I am," he admitted, "quite another Man with M. C., Malone, Courtenay."7
Moreover, Boswell often solicited Courtenay's advice in various crises. ”

“ Locke reason more philosophically, by asserting that "no doctrine, however clearly expressed in Scripture, is to be admitted, if it contradict the evidence of our senses:—For our evidence for the truth of revealed religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses, because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater ”

“ Their friendship, nevertheless, seems to have ended on a happy note, for Boswell's final mention of Courtenay in his journal includes the remark that with Courtenay he had spent a "good day."12
Courtenay's Poetical Review, characterized by Donald A. Stauffer as an embodiment of the "vice-and-virtue philosophy" in biography, was one of the most spirited pieces of Johnsoniana to appear.13 [Pg iv] The poem begins with disdain, but at line sixty-one reverses direction and becomes vigorously commendatory. Courtenay did not attempt to add fresh information about Johnson's life and career. ”

“ To keep a journal. To begin this day. (Sept. 18th, 1766.)
To spend four hours in study every day, and as much more as I can.
To read a portion of Scripture in Greek every Sunday.
To rise at eight.—Oct. 3d. Of all this I have done nothing." Ibid.
[33] "I resolved last Easter to read, within the year, the whole Bible; a great part of which I had never looked upon." Meditations. ”

“ To the great disgrace of some of his clerical friends, forty sermons, which he himself tells us he wrote, have not yet been deterré.
[62] "A good continued speech (says Bacon in his Essays) without a good speech of interlocution, shews slowness; and a good reply or second speech, without a good settled speech, sheweth shallowness and weakness. As we see in beasts, that those that are weakest in the course, are yet nimblest in the turn; as it is betwixt the greyhound and the hare."—If this observation be just, Dr. Johnson is an exception to the rule ”

“ William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles; Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Corresponding Secretary: Mrs. Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
The Society's purpose is to publish rare Restoration and eighteenth-century works (usually as facsimile reproductions) . All income of the Society is devoted to defraying costs of publication and mailing. ”

“ Footnotes:
[21] "A Scotchman must be a sturdy moralist, who does not prefer Scotland to truth." Johnson's Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland.
[22] "The Poems of Dr. Watts were by my recommendation inserted in this collection; the readers of which are to impute to me whatever pleasure or weariness they may find in the perusal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret and Yalden." Johnson's Life of Watts.
The following specimen of their productions may be sufficient to enable the reader to judge of their respective merits:
"Alas, Jerusalem! ”

“ Garrick. Some of his Ramblers were written while the printer's messenger was waiting to carry the copy to the press. Many of the Idlers were written at Oxford; Dr. Johnson often began his talk only just in time not to miss the post, and sent away the paper without reading it over.
[51] See his admirable Lives of the Poets, and particularly his Disquisition on metaphysical and religious poetry.
[52] See his Review of Soame Jennings's Essay on the Origin of Evil; a masterpiece of composition, both for vigour of style and precision of ideas. ”

“ Boswell gives no precise date for Courtenay's entry into the Club. His first reference to Courtenay's membership occurs in his journal entry of 19 January 1790. See Private Papers of James Boswell, ed. Geoffrey Scott and Frederick A. Pottle (Privately Printed, 1928-1934) , XVIII, 22. See also Boswell's letter to Edmond Malone dated 16 December 1790, Letters of James Boswell, ed. C. B. Tinker (Oxford, 1924) , II, 409-410. Courtenay and other intimates of Boswell were called "The Gang" by Philip Metcalfe. ”

“ An Apology for the Tale of a Tub.—With respect to this work being the production of Swift, see his letter to the printer, Mr. Benjamin Tooke, dated Dublin, June 29, 1710, and Tooke's Answer on the publication of the Apology and a new edition of the Tale of a Tub. Hawkesworth's edition of Swift's Works, 8vo. vol. xvi. p. 145.
Doctor Hawkesworth mentions, in his preface, that the edition of A Tale of a Tub, printed in 1710, was revised and corrected by the Dean a short time before his understanding was impaired, and that the corrected copy was, in the year 1760, in the hands of his kinsman, Mr. ”

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REGULAR PUBLICATIONS FOR 1968-1969
133. John Courtenay, A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) . Introduction by Robert E. Kelley. ”