'
[654] See _ante_, i. 399.
[655] 'Sir' said Edwards to Johnson (_post_, April 17, 1778),
'I remember you would not let us say _prodigious_ at College.'
[656] 'Emigration was at this time a common topick of discourse.
Dr. Johnson regretted it as hurtful to human happiness.' Boswell's
_Hebrides_, Aug. 15, 1773.
[657] In 1766 Johnson wrote a paper (first published in 1808) to
prove that 'the bounty upon corn has produced plenty.' 'The truth of
these principles,' he says, 'our ancestors discovered by reason, and the
French have now found it by experience. In this regulation we have the
honour of being masters to those who, in commercial policy, have been
long accounted the masters of the world.' _Works_, v. 323, 326, and
_ante_, i. 518. 'In 1688 was granted the parliamentary bounty upon the
exportation of corn. The country gentlemen had felt that the money price
of corn was falling. The bounty was an expedient to raise it
artificially to the high price at which it had frequently been sold in
the times of Charles I. and II.' Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, book I. c.
xi. The year 1792, the last year of peace before the great war, was
likewise the last year of exportation.
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