Mr. Johnson's sayings as nearly as I could, in his own
peculiar forcible language,[128] for which, prejudiced or little
criticks have taken upon them to find fault with him. He is above making
any answer to them, but I have found a sufficient answer in a general
remark in one of his excellent papers. "Difference of thoughts will
produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than
another, will want words of larger meaning."[129]

[Footnote 128: "Lord Pembroke said once to me at Wilton, with a happy
pleasantry and some truth, that Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear
so extraordinary were it not for his _bow-wow-way_."--Boswell's "Journal
of a Tour to the Hebrides," page 7.--ED.]

[Footnote 129: "Idler," number 70.]

I hope to be pardoned for this digression, wherein I pay a just tribute
of veneration and gratitude to one from whose writings and conversation
I have received instructions of which I experience the value in every
scene of my life.

During Paoli's administration there have been few laws made in Corsica.
He mentioned one which he has found very efficacious in curbing that
vindictive spirit of the Corsicans, of which I have said a good deal in
a former part of this work. There was among the Corsicans a most
dreadful species of revenge, called "Vendetta trasversa, Collateral
revenge," which Petrus Cyrnaeus candidly acknowledges. It was this. If a
man had received an injury, and could not find a proper opportunity to
be revenged on his enemy personally, he revenged himself on one of his
enemy's relations. So barbarous a practice, was the source of
innumerable assassinations. Paoli knowing that the point of honour was
every thing to the Corsicans, opposed it to the progress of the blackest
of crimes, fortified by long habits. He made a law, by which it was
provided, that this collateral revenge should not only be punished with
death, as ordinary murther, but the memory of the offender should be
disgraced for ever by a pillar of infamy. He also had it enacted that
the same statute should extend to the violatours of an oath of
reconciliation, once made.

By thus combating a vice so destructive, he has, by a kind of shock of
opposite passions, reduced the fiery Corsicans to a state of mildness,
and he assured me that they were now all fully sensible of the equity of
that law.

While I was at Sollacaro information was received that the poor wretch
who strangled the woman at the instigation