'
After stating that he is going to Geneva, he continues:--
'I shall see Voltaire; I shall also see Switzerland and Rousseau. These
two men are to me greater objects than most statues or pictures.'
--Nichols's _Literary History_, vii. 318.
_Superficiality of the French writers_.
(Vol. i, p. 454.)
Gibbon, writing of the year 1759, says:--
'In France, to which my ideas [in the _Essay on the Study of Literature_]
were confined, the learning and language of Greece and Rome were
neglected by a philosophic age. The guardian of those studies, the
Academy of Inscriptions, was degraded to the lowest rank among the
three royal societies of Paris; the new appellation of _Erudits_ was
contemptuously applied to the successors of Lipsius and Casaubon; and
I was provoked to hear (see M. d'Alembert, _Discours preliminaire a
l'Encyclopedie_) that the exercise of the memory, their sole merit,
had been superseded by the nobler faculties of the imagination and the
judgment.'
--_Memoirs of Edward Gibbon_, ed. 1827, i. 104.
_A Synod of Cooks_.
(Vol. i, p. 470.)
When Johnson spoke of 'a Synod of Cooks' he was, I conjecture, thinking
of Milton's 'Synod of Gods,' in Beelzebub's speech in Paradise Lost,
book ii. line 391.
_Johnson and Bishop Percy_.
(Vol. i, p. 486.)
Bishop Percy in a letter to Boswell says: 'When in 1756 or 1757 I
became acquainted with Johnson, he told me he had lived twenty years
in London, but not very happily.
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