Life of Johnson, Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 744 pages of information about Life of Johnson, Volume 4.

Life of Johnson, Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 744 pages of information about Life of Johnson, Volume 4.

[249] Miss Burney describes a dinner at Mr. Thrale’s, about this time, at which she met Johnson, Boswell, and Dudley Long.  Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary, ii. 14.

[250] See ante, ii.171, post, two paragraphs before April 10, 1783, and May 15, 1784.

[251] Johnson wrote on May i, 1780:—­’There was the Bishop of St. Asaph who comes to every place.’ Piozzi Letters, ii. 111.  Hannah More, in 1782, describes an assembly at this Bishop’s.  ’Conceive to yourself 150 or 200 people met together dressed in the extremity of the fashion, painted as red as Bacchanals...ten or a dozen card-tables crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics and yellow admirals.’ Memoirs, i.242.  He was elected a member of the Literary Club, ’with the sincere approbation and eagerness of all present,’ wrote Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Jones; elected, too, on the same day on which Lord Chancellor Camden was rejected (ante, iii. 311, note 2).  Two or three years later Sir William married the Bishop’s daughter. Life of Sir W Jones, pp.240, 279.

[252] ’Trust not to looks, nor credit outward show; The villain lurks beneath the cassocked beau.’  Churchill’s Poems (ed. 1766), ii.41.

[253] No. 2.

[254] See vol. i p. 378.  BOSWELL.

[255] Northcote, according to Hazlitt, said of this character with some truth, that ’it was like one of Kneller’s portraits—­it would do for anybody.’  Northcote’s Conversations, p.86.

[256] See post, p.98.

[257] London Chronicle, May 2, 1769.  This respectable man is there mentioned to have died on the 3rd of April, that year, at Cofflect, the seat of Thomas Veale, Esq., in his way to London.  BOSWELL.

[258] Dr. Harte was the tutor of Mr. Eliot and of young Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield’s illegitimate son.  ‘My morning hopes,’ wrote Chesterfield to his son at Rome, ’are justly placed in Mr. Harte, and the masters he will give you; my evening ones in the Roman ladies:  pray be attentive to both.’  Chesterfield’s Letters, ii.263.  See ante, i.163, note 1, ii.120, and post, June 27, 1784.

[259] Robertson’s Scotland is in the February list of books in the Gent.  Mag. for 1759; Harte’s Gustavus Adolphus and Hume’s England under the House of Tudor in the March list.  Perhaps it was from Hume’s competition that Harte suffered.

[260] Essays on Husbandry, 1764.

[261] See ante, iii. 381.

[262] ’Christmas Day, 1780.  I shall not attempt to see Vestris till the weather is milder, though it is the universal voice that he is the only perfect being that has dropped from the clouds, within the memory of man or woman...When the Parliament meets he is to be thanked by the Speaker.’  Walpole’s Letters, vii. 480.

[263] Here Johnson uses his title of Doctor (ante, ii.332, note 1), but perhaps he does so as quoting the paragraph in the newspaper.

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Life of Johnson, Volume 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.