'
Boswell also has tried his hand at it; and a correspondent of the
"Gentleman's Magazine" suggests that Johnson had in his mind an
epigram on a young lady who appeared at a masquerade in Paris,
habited as a Jesuit, during the height of the contention between the
Jansenists and Molinists concerning free will:--
"On s'etonne ici que Calviniste
Eut pris l'habit de Moliniste,
Puisque que cette jeune beaute
Ote a chacun sa liberte,
N'est ce pas une Janseniste."[1]
[Footnote 1: "Menagiana," vol. iii. p. 376. Edition of 1716. Equally
happy were Lord Chesterfield's lines to a young lady who appeared at
a Dublin ball, with an orange breastknot:--
Mrs. Thrale took the lead even when her husband might be expected to
strike in, as when Johnson was declaiming paradoxically against
action in oratory: "Action can have no effect on reasonable minds. It
may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument." _Mrs. Thrale_.
"What then, Sir, becomes of Demosthenes' saying, Action, action,
action?" _Johnson_. "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of
brutes, to a barbarous people." "The polished Athenians!" is her
marginal protest, and a conclusive one.
In English literature she was rarely at fault. In
"Pretty Tory, where's the jest
To wear that riband on thy breast,
When that same breast betraying shows
The whiteness of the rebel rose?"
White was adopted by the malcontent Irish as the French emblem.
Johnson's epigram may have been suggested by Propertius:
"Nullus liber erit si quis amare volet.
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