[100] A literary lady has favoured me with a characteristick anecdote of Richardson.  One day at his country-house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance,—­that he had seen his Clarissa lying on the King’s brother’s table.  Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it.  But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, ‘I think, Sir, you were saying something about,—­’ pausing in a high flutter of expectation.  The gentleman provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference answered, ‘A mere trifle Sir, not worth repeating.’  The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day.  Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much.  BOSWELL.

[101]

     ’E’en in a bishop I can spy desert;
      Seeker is decent, Rundel has a heart.’

Pope, Epil. to Sat. ii. 70.  Horace Walpole wrote on Aug. 4,1768 (Letters, v. 115):—­’We have lost our Pope.  Canterbury [Archbishop Seeker] died yesterday.  He had never been a Papist, but almost everything else.  Our Churchmen will not be Catholics; that stock seems quite fallen.’

[102] Perhaps the Earl of Corke. Ante, iii. 183.

[103] Garrick perhaps borrowed this saying when, in his epigram on Goldsmith, speaking of the ideas of which his head was full, he said:—­

     ’When his mouth opened all were in a pother,
      Rushed to the door and tumbled o’er each other,
      But rallying soon with all their force again,
      In bright array they issued from his pen.’

Fitzgerald’s Garrick, ii. 363.  See ante, ii. 231.

[104] See ante, i. 116, and ii. 52.

[105] Horace Walpole (Letters, ix. 318) writes of Boswell’s Life of Johnson:—­’Dr. Blagden says justly, that it is a new kind of libel, by which you may abuse anybody, by saying some dead person said so and so of somebody alive.’

[106] See ante, ii.  III.  In the Gent.  Mag. 1770, p. 78, is a review of A Letter to Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ’that is generally imputed to Mr. Wilkes.’

[107] ’Do you conceive the full force of the word CONSTITUENT?  It has the same relation to the House of Commons as Creator to creature.’ A Letter to Samuel Johnson, LL.D., p. 23.

[108] His profound admiration of the GREAT FIRST CAUSE was such as to set him above that ‘Philosophy and vain deceit’ [Colossians, ii. 8] with which men of narrower conceptions have been infected.  I have heard him strongly maintain that ’what is right is not so from any natural fitness, but because GOD wills it to be right;’ and it is certainly so, because he has predisposed the relations of things so as that which he wills must be right.  BOSWELL.  Johnson was as much opposed as the Rev. Mr. Thwackum to the philosopher Square, who ’measured all actions by the unalterable rule of right and the eternal fitness of things.’ Tom Jones, book iii. ch. 3.