Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris—­_: 

But the author of this verse has not, I believe, been discovered.  MALONE.  The ‘Greek lambick’ in the above note is not Greek.  To a learned friend I owe the following note.  ’The Quem Jupiter vult perdere, &c., is said to be a translation of a fragment of Euripides by Joshua Barnes.  There is, I believe, no such fragment at all.  In Barnes’s Euripides, Cantab. 1694, fol. p. 515, is a fragment of Euripides with a note which may explain the muddle of Boswell’s correspondent:—­

“[Greek:  otau de daimonn handri porsunae kaka ton noun heblapse proton,]”

on which Barnes writes:—­“Tale quid in Franciados nostrae [probably his uncompleted poem on Edward III.] l. 3. Certe ille deorum Arbiter ultricem cum vult extendere dextram Dementat prius."’ See ante, ii. 445, note 1.  Sir D. O. is, perhaps, Sir D’Anvers Osborne, whose death is recorded in the Gent.  Mag. 1753, p. 591.  ’Sir D’Anvers Osborne, Bart., Governor of New York, soon after his arrival there; in his garden.’  Solamen miseris, &c., is imitated by Swift in his Verses on Stella’s Birthday, 1726-7:—­

     ’The only comfort they propose,
     To have companions in their woes.’

Swift’s Works, ed. 1803, xi. 22.  The note on Lucrece was, I conjecture, on line 1111:—­

‘Grief best is pleased with grief’s society.’

[571]

      ’FAUSTUS—­
     “Tu quoque, ut hic video, non es ignarus amorum.” 
       ’FORTUNATUS—­
     “Id commune malum; semel insanivimus omnes."’

Baptistae Mantuani Carmelitae Adolescentia, seu Bucolica.  Ecloga I, published in 1498.  ‘Scaliger,’ says Johnson (Works, viii. 391), ’complained that Mantuan’s Bucolicks were received into schools, and taught as classical. ...  He was read, at least in some of the inferiour schools of this kingdom, to the beginning of the present [eighteenth] century.’

[572] See ante, i. 368.

[573] See ante, i. 396.

[574] I am happy, however, to mention a pleasing instance of his enduring with great gentleness to hear one of his most striking particularities pointed out:—­Miss Hunter, a niece of his friend Christopher Smart, when a very young girl, struck by his extraordinary motions, said to him, ’Pray, Dr. Johnson, why do you make such strange gestures?’ ‘From bad habit,’ he replied.  ’Do you, my dear, take care to guard against bad habits.’  This I was told by the young lady’s brother at Margate.  BOSWELL.  Boswell had himself told Johnson of some of them, at least in writing.  Johnson read in manuscript his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.  Boswell says in a note on Oct. 12:—­’It is remarkable that Dr. Johnson should have read this account of some of his own peculiar habits, without saying anything on the subject, which I hoped he would have done.’