[1240] This visit was not to Lord Lyttelton, but to his uncle [afterwards by successive creations, Lord Westcote, and Lord Lyttelton], the father of the present Lord Lyttelton, who lived at a house called Little Hagley.  DUPPA.  Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale in 1771:—­’I would have been glad to go to Hagley in compliance with Mr. Lyttelton’s kind invitation, for beside the pleasure of his conversation I should have had the opportunity of recollecting past times, and wandering per montes notos et flumina nota, of recalling the images of sixteen, and reviewing my conversations with poor Ford.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 42.  He had been at school at Stourbridge, close by Hagley. Ante, i. 49.  See Walpole’s Letters, ix. 123, for an anecdote of Lord Westcote.

[1241] Horace Walpole, writing of Hagley in Sept. 1753 (Letters, ii. 352), says:—­’There is extreme taste in the park:  the seats are not the best, but there is not one absurdity.  There is a ruined castle, built by Miller, that would get him his freedom even of Strawberry [Walpole’s own house at Twickenham]:  it has the true rust of the Barons’ Wars.’

[1242] ’Mrs. Lyttelton forced me to play at whist against my liking, and her husband took away Johnson’s candle that he wanted to read by at the other end of the room.  Those, I trust, were the offences.’ Piozzi MS. CROKER.

[1243] Johnson (Works, viii. 409) thus writes of Shenstone and the Leasowes:—­’He began to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. ....  For awhile the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress by conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception; injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain.  Where there is emulation there will be vanity; and where there is vanity there will be folly.  The pleasure of Shenstone was all in his eye:  he valued what he valued merely for its looks; nothing raised his indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his water.’  See ante, p. 345.

[1244] See ante, iii. 187, and v. 429.

[1245] ’He spent his estate in adorning it, and his death was probably hastened by his anxieties.  He was a lamp that spent its oil in blazing.  It is said that if he had lived a little longer he would have been assisted by a pension:  such bounty could not have been ever more properly bestowed.’  Johnson’s Works, viii. 410.  His friend, Mr. Graves, the author of The Spiritual Quixote, in a note on this passage says that, if he was sometimes distressed for money, yet he was able to leave legacies and two small annuities.