[565] Miss Burney mentions meeting Dr. Harington at Bath in 1780.  ’It is his son,’ she writes, ’who published those very curious remains of his ancestor [Sir John Harington] under the title Nugae Antiquae which my father and all of us were formerly so fond of.’  Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary, i. 341.

[566]

     ’For though they are but trifles, thou
      Some value didst to them allow.’

      Martin’s Catullus, p. 1.

[567]

     —­Underneath this rude, uncouth disguise,
     A genius of extensive knowledge lies.’

     FRANCIS.  Horace, Satires, i. 3. 33.

[568] He would not have been a troublesome patient anywhere, for, according to Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 275),’he required less attendance, sick or well, than ever I saw any human creature.’

[569] ’That natural jealousy which makes every man unwilling to allow much excellence in another, always produces a disposition to believe that the mind grows old with the body; and that he whom we are now forced to confess superiour is hastening daily to a level with ourselves.’  Johnson’s Works, vii. 212.

[570] With the following elucidation of the saying-Quos Deus (it should rather be-Quem Jupiter) vult perdere, prius dementat-Mr. Boswell was furnished by Mr. Pitts:—­’Perhaps no scrap of Latin whatever has been more quoted than this.  It occasionally falls even from those who are scrupulous even to pedantry in their Latinity, and will not admit a word into their compositions, which has not the sanction of the first age.  The word demento is of no authority, either as a verb active or neuter.—­After a long search for the purpose of deciding a bet, some gentlemen of Cambridge found it among the fragments of Euripides, in what edition I do not recollect, where it is given as a translation of a Greek Iambick:  [Greek:  Ou Theos thelei apolesoi’ apophreuai.]

’The above scrap was found in the hand-writing of a suicide of fashion, Sir D. O., some years ago, lying on the table of the room where he had destroyed himself.  The suicide was a man of classical acquirements:  he left no other paper behind him.’

Another of these proverbial sayings,

     Incidit in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charybdim,

I, in a note on a passage in The Merchant of Venice [act iii. sc. 5], traced to its source.  It occurs (with a slight variation) in the Alexandreis of Philip Gualtier (a poet of the thirteenth century), which was printed at Lyons in 1558.  Darius is the person addressed:—­

—­Quo tendis inertem, Rex periture, fugam? nescis, heu! perdite, nescis Quern fugias:  hostes incurris dum fugis hostem; Incidis in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charybdim.

A line not less frequently quoted was suggested for enquiry in a note on The Rape of Lucrece:—­