Quotations and Literature Forum

FWIW, I maintain a <a href="http://www.samueljohnson.com/apocryph.html">page</a> of significant misattributions to Samuel Johnson on my Johnson <a href="http://www.samueljohnson.com">site</a>.

Some of these misattributions (or unsupported attributions) are <b>very</b> common, and I encourage you to review the page and purge/correct your own lists.

Among them:
The "I hate mankind..." which should be attributed to Joseph Baretti;
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
"Slander is the revenge of a coward..."

I know that all web sites have errors, but this list has been checked against a CD-ROM prepared for the institutional market (priced over $400 IIRC, and devoted to Johnson) and based on the recognized canon.

Hi Frank! I've always enjoyed your site and your posts in alt.quotations.

I corrected the Baretti one a few months ago when you mentioned it in the newsgroup:

I've been meaning to look through your other misquotations and correct our errors. I'll take a look at it tonight.

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Michael Moncur
Owner and maintainer, The Quotations Page

Michael, I didn't mean <b>you</b> personally re the Baretti (I knew you'd corrected it). I really meant that quotation enthusiasts in general would do well to review the page and correct their lists. ("I can see my good intentions are paving the road the Hell" -- all sorts of people except Samuel Johnson.)

Ah, sorry for jumping to conclusions. Nonetheless I found a few from that page in our collections, and marked them as (attributed).

Thanks for your excellent resource.

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Michael Moncur
Owner and maintainer, The Quotations Page

I am sure I'll just be exposing my ignorance here, but I am curious to know if the attribution of this quote to Joseph Baretti (quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson) is verified via any other source than

and the reference to "Croker correctly supposed."
I only ask because only a few sentences after the "I hate mankind" quote, there is the statement

I am not clear on who is saying "I named Hume." Is is Boswell?
And some give the impression, or interpretation, that this whole exchange is about David Hume, as in this webpage
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/hume.html
It is interesting information that Boswell entered the Baretti attribution in his journals, but for some reason that note did not make into the book "Life of Johnson."
Frank's website is extremely thorough. I had not been to it before and I am very glad to be made aware of it. Very impressive.

I mentioned Croker's supposition that it was Baretti because Croker's supposition is mentioned in the Hill-Powell edition of Boswell's LOJ. The Hill-Powell edition is the edition usually referenced in footnotes, and is somewhat of a standard (sadly, because it's not readily available!)

With respect to your other query, Boswell's dialog with Johnson (as described in <i>The Life</i>) has changed subjects.

The page where your confusion comes from is on <b>Jack</b> Lynch's web site [we know each other, but are not related], and Jack may not be aware that the first part of the paragraph is about Baretti. Neither Jack nor I are Boswell authorities (we were both called upon to vet a piece for the New Yorker on Boswell, and had to throw up our hands over many questions that were Boswell specific).

But since that time I've bought all of Boswell's Journals, and when I wrote the paragraph on my apocrypha page I was looking at the actual volume. (It is not something someone emailed me and said "trust me.")

As for why Boswell left Baretti's name out of the exchange when publishing the LOJ, he recived harsh criticism over his inclusion of names and details in his "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides," which preceeded the LOJ by a number of years. The experience may have left him gun shy, and Baretti was still alive.

Hill-Powell is not so firm in mentioning Baretti, I believe, because the Boswell Journals were not out at the time.