The ‘contemptible scribbler’ was, I believe, John Wolcot, better known by his assumed name of Peter Pindar.  He had been a clergyman.  In his Epistle to Boswell (Works, i. 219), he says in reference to the passages about Sir A. Macdonald (afterwards Lord Macdonald):—­’A letter of severe remonstrance was sent to Mr. B., who, in consequence, omitted in the second edition of his Journal what is so generally pleasing to the public, viz., the scandalous passages relative to that nobleman.’  It was in a letter to the Gent.  Mag. 1786, p. 285, that Boswell ‘publickly disproved the insinuation’ made ’in a late scurrilous publication’ that these passages ’were omitted in consequence of a letter from his Lordship.  Nor was any application,’ he continues, ’made to me by the nobleman alluded to at any time to make any alteration in my Journal.’

[1152]

         ’Nothing extenuate
     Nor set down aught in malice.’

Othello, act v. sc. 2.

[1153] See ante, i. 189, note 2, 296, 297; and Johnson’s Works, v. 23.

[1154] Of his two imitations Boswell means The Vanity of Human Wishes, of which one hundred lines were written in a day. Ante, i. 192, and ii. 15.

[1155] Johnson, it should seem, did not allow that there was any pleasure in writing poetry.  ’It has been said there is pleasure in writing, particularly in writing verses.  I allow you may have pleasure from writing after it is over, if you have written well; but you don’t go willingly to it again.’ Ante, iv. 219.  What Johnson always sought was to sufficiently occupy the mind.  So long as that was done, that labour would, I believe, seem to him the pleasanter which required the less thought.

[1156] Nathan Bailey published his English Dictionary in 1721.

[1157]

     ’Woolston, the scourge of scripture, mark with awe! 
      And mighty Jacob, blunderbuss of law.’

The Dunciad, first ed., bk. iii. l. 149.  Giles Jacob published a Law Dictionary in 1729.

[1158] Ante, p. 393.

[1159] A writer in the Gent.  Mag. 1786, p. 388, with some reason says:—­’I heartily wish Mr. Boswell would get this Latin poem translated.’

[1160] Boswell, briefly mentioning the tour which Johnson made to Wales in the year 1774 with Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, says:—­’I do not find that he kept any journal or notes of what he saw there’ (ante, ii. 285).  A journal had been kept however, which in 1816 was edited and published by Mr. Duppa.  Mrs. Piozzi, writing in October of that year, says that three years earlier she had been shewn the MS. by a Mr. White, and that it was genuine.  ’The gentleman who possessed it seemed shy of letting me read the whole, and did not, as it appeared, like being asked how it came into his hands.’  Hayward’s Piozzi, ii. 177.  According