The sum of the dispute was this. Wit being talked of, Mr. Pepys repeated,--
“True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.”
“That, sir,” cried Dr. Johnson, “is a definition both false and foolish. Let wit be dressed how it will, it will equally be wit, and neither the more nor the less for any advantage dress can give it.”
Mr. P.-But, sir, may not wit be so ill expressed, and so obscure, by a bad speaker, as to be lost?
Dr. J.-The fault, then, sir, must be with the hearer. If a man cannot distinguish wit from words, he little deserves to hear it.
Dr. J.-Sir, what Pope means, if he means what he says, is both false and foolish. In the first place, 'what oft was thought,' is all the worse for being often thought, because to be wit, it ought to be newly thought.
Mr. P.-But, sir, 'tis the expression makes it new.
Dr. J.-How can the expression make it new? It may make it clear, or may make it elegant---but how new? You are confounding words with things.
Mr. P.-But, sir, if one man says a thing very ill, may not another man say it so much better that--
Dr. J.-That other man, sir, deserves but small praise for the amendment; he is but the tailor to the first man's thoughts.
Mr. P.-True, sir, he may be but the tailor; but then the difference is as great as between a man in a gold lace suit and a man in a blanket.
Dr. J.-Just so, sir, I thank you for that; the difference is precisely such, since it consists neither in the gold lace suit nor the blanket, but in the man by whom they are worn.
This was the summary; the various contemptuous sarcasms intermixed would fill, and very unpleasantly, a quire.
_Oct. 30._--Lady Warren is immensely tall, and extremely beautiful; she is now but just nineteen, though she has been married two or three years. She is giddy, gay, chatty, good-humoured, and a little affected; she hazards all that occurs to her, seems to think the world at her feet, and is so young and gay and handsome that she is not much mistaken. She is, in short, an inferior Lady Honoria Pemberton;[155] somewhat beneath her in parts and understanding, but strongly in that class of character. I had no conversation with her myself; but her voice is loud and deep, and all she said was for the whole room.