Lady Philips was known to Johnson through Miss Williams, to whom, as a note in Croker’s Boswell (p. 74) shews, she made a small yearly allowance.

[753] ’To teach the minuter decencies and inferiour duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation, was first attempted by Casa in his book of Manners, and Castiglione in his Courtier; two books yet celebrated in Italy for purity and elegance.’  Johnson’s Works, vii. 428. The Courtier was translated into English so early as 1561.  Lowndes’s Bibl.  Man. ed. 1871, p. 386.

[754] Burnet (History of His Own Time, ii. 296) mentions Whitby among the persons who both managed and directed the controversial war’ against Popery towards the end of Charles II’s reign.  ‘Popery,’ he says, ’was never so well understood by the nation as it came to be upon this occasion.’  Whitby’s Commentary on the New Testament was published in 1703-9.

[755] By Henry Mackenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling.  Ante, i. 360.  It had been published anonymously this spring.  The play of the same name is by Macklin.  It was brought out in 1781.

[756] No doubt Sir A. Macdonald. Ante, p. 148.  This ’penurious gentleman’ is mentioned again, p. 315.

[757] Moliere’s play of L’Avare.

[758]

     ‘...facit indignatio versum.’

Juvenal, Sat. i. 79.

[759] See ante, iii. 252.

[760] He was sixty-four.

[761] Still, perhaps, in the Western Isles, ’It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.’  Tennyson’s Ulysses.

[762] See ante, ii, 51.

[763] See ante, ii. 150.

[764] Sir Alexander Macdonald.

[765] ‘To be or not to be:  that is the question.’ Hamlet, act iii. sc. 1.

[766] Virgil, Eclogues, iii.  III.

[767] ‘The stormy Hebrides.’  Milton’s Lycidas, 1. 156.

[768] Boswell was thinking of the passage (p. xxi.) in which Hawkesworth tells how one of Captain Cook’s ships was saved by the wind falling.  ‘If,’ he writes, ’it was a natural event, providence is out of the question; at least we can with no more propriety say that providentially the wind ceased, than that providentially the sun rose in the morning.  If it was not,’ &c.  According to Malone the attacks made on Hawkesworth in the newspapers for this passage ’affected him so much that from low spirits he was seized with a nervous fever, which on account of the high living he had indulged in had the more power on him; and he is supposed to have put an end to his life by intentionally taking an immoderate dose of opium.’  Prior’s Malone, p. 441.  Mme. D’Arblay says that these attacks shortened his life. Memoirs of Dr. Burney, i. 278.  He died on Nov. 17 of this year.  See ante, i. 252, and ii. 247.