tly
defensible; a man heated in talk, and eager of victory, takes advantage
of the mistakes or ignorance of his adversary, lays hold of concessions
to which he knows he has no right, and urges proofs likely to prevail on
his opponent, though he knows himself that they have no force.' J. S.
Mill gives somewhat the same account of his own father. 'I am inclined
to think,' he writes, 'that he did injustice to his own opinions by the
unconscious exaggerations of an intellect emphatically polemical; and
that when thinking without an adversary in view, he was willing to make
room for a great portion of the truths he seemed to deny.' Mill's
_Autobiography_, p. 201. See also _ante_, ii. 100, 450, in. 23, 277,
331; and _post_, May 18, 1784, and Steevens's account of Johnson just
before June 22, 1784.

[361] Thomas Shaw, D.D., author of _Travels to Barbary and the Levant_.

[362] See ante, iii. 314.

[363] The friend very likely was Boswell himself. He was one of 'these
_tanti_ men.' 'I told Paoli that in the very heat of youth I felt the
_nom est tanti_, the _omnia vanitas_ of one who has exhausted all the
sweets of his being, and is weary with dull repetition. I told him that
I had almost become for ever incapable of taking a part in active life.'
Boswell's _Corsica_, ed. 1879, p. 193.

[364] _Letters on the English Nation: By Batista Angeloni, a Jesuit, who
resided many years in London. Translated from the original Italian by
the Author of the Marriage Act. A Novel_. 2 vols. London [no printer's
name given], 1755. Shebbeare published besides six _Letters to the
People of England_ in the years 1755-7, for the last of which he was
sentenced to the pillory. _Ante_, iii. 315, note I. Horace Walpole
(_Letters_, iii. 74) described him in 1757 as 'a broken Jacobite
physician, who has threatened to write himself into a place or
the pillory.'

[365] I recollect a ludicrous paragraph in the newspapers, that the King
had pensioned both a _He_-bear and a _She_-bear. BOSWELL. See _ante_,
ii. 66, and _post_, April 28, 1783.

[366]

Witness, ye chosen train
Who breathe the sweets of his Saturnian reign;
Witness ye Hills, ye Johnsons, Scots, Shebbeares,
Hark to my call, for some of you have ears.'

_Heroic Epistle_. See _post_, under June 16, 1784.

[367] In this he was unlike the King, who, writes Horace Walpole,'
expecting only an attack on Chambers, bought it to tease, and began
reading it to, him; but,