[131] One of Garrick’s correspondents speaks of ’the sneer of one of Johnson’s ghastly smiles.’ Garrick Corres. i. 334. ‘Ghastly smile’ is borrowed from Paradise Lost, ii. 846.
[132] See ante, iii. 212. In Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh, ii. 158, is given a comic poem entitled The Court of Session Garland, written by Boswell, with the help, it was said, of Maclaurin.
[133] Dr. John Gregory, Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, died on Feb. 10 of this year. It was his eldest son James who met Johnson. ’This learned family has given sixteen professors to British Universities.’ Chalmers’s Biog. Dict. xvi. 289.
[134] See ante, i. 257, note 3.
[135] See ante, i. 228.
[136] See ante, ii. 196.
[137] In the original, cursed the form that, &c. Johnson’s Works, i. 21.
[138] Mistress of Edward IV. BOSWELL.
[139] Mistress of Louis XIV. BOSWELL. Voltaire, speaking of the King and Mlle. de La Valliere (not Valiere, as Lord Hailes wrote her name), says:—’Il gouta avec elle le bonheur rare d’etre aime uniquement pour lui-meme.’ Siecle de Louis XIV, ch. 25. He describes her penitence in a fine passage. Ib. ch. 26.
[140] Malone, in a note on the Life of Boswell under 1749, says that ’this lady was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett [in Peregrine Pickle], but Anne Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London.’ She is mentioned in a note to Horace Walpole’s Letters, 1. cxxxvi.
[141] Catharine Sedley, the mistress of James II, is described by Macaulay, Hist of Eng. ed. 1874, ii. 323.
[142] Dr. A Carlyle (Auto. p. 114) tells how in 1745 he found ’Professor Maclaurin busy on the walls on the south side of Edinburgh, endeavoring to make them more defensible [against the Pretender]. He had even erected some small cannon.’ See ante, iii, 15, for a ridiculous story told of him by Goldsmith.
[143]
’Crudelis
ubique
Luctus, ubique pavor, et plurima
mortis imago:’
’grim grief on every
side,
And fear on every side there is,
and many-faced is death.’
Morris, Virgil Aeneids, ii. 368.
[144] Mr. Maclaurin’s epitaph, as engraved on a marble tomb-stone, in the Grey-Friars church-yard, Edinburgh:—
Infra situs est
COLIN MACLAURIN,
Mathes. olim in Acad.
Edin. Prof.
Electus ipso Newtono
suadente.
H.L.P.F.
Non ut nomini paterno
consulat,
Nam tali auxilio nil
eget;
Sed ut in hoc infelici
campo,
Ubi luctus regnant et
pavor,
Mortalibus prorsus non
absit solatium;
Hujus enim scripta evolve,
Mentemque tantarum rerum
capacem
Corpori caduco superstitem
crede.