[1061] See _ante_, ii. 468.
[1062] See Appendix C.
[1063] 'All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a
prescience of the future which has not been given us. They are, I think,
a crime, because they resign that life to chance which God has given us
to be regulated by reason; and superinduce a kind of fatality, from
which it is the great privilege of our nature to be free.' _Piozzi
Letters_, i. 83. Johnson (_Works_, vii. 52) praises the 'just and noble
thoughts' in Cowley's lines which begin:--
'Where honour or where conscience does not bind,
No other law shall shackle me;
Slave to myself I ne'er will be;
Nor shall my future actions be confined
By my own present mind.'
See _ante_, ii. 21.
[1064] Juvenal, _Sat_. iii. 78. Imitated by Johnson in _London_.
[1065] See Boswell's _Hebrides_, Aug. 16, and Johnson's _Tour into
Wales_, Aug. 1, 1774.
[1066] The slip of paper on which he made the correction, is deposited
by me in the noble library to which it relates, and to which I have
presented other pieces of his hand-writing. BOSWELL. In substituting
_burns_ he resumes the reading of the first edition, in which the former
of the two couplets ran:--
'Resistless burns the fever of renown,
Caught from the strong contagion of the gown.
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