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.
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