...  ’I have had another letter from my father, in which he continues of opinion that travelling is of very little use, and may do a great deal of harm. ...  I esteem and love my father, and I am determined to do what is in my power to make him easy and happy.  But you will allow that I may endeavour to make him happy, and at the same time not to be too hard upon myself.  I must use you so much with the freedom of a friend as to tell you that with the vivacity which you allowed me I have a melancholy disposition.  I have made excursions into the fields of amusement, perhaps of folly.  I have found that amusement and folly are beneath me, and that without some laudable pursuit my life must be insipid and wearisome.....  My father seems much against my going to Italy, but gives me leave to go from this, and pass some months in Paris.  I own that the words of the Apostle Paul, “I must see Rome,” are strongly borne in upon my mind.  It would give me infinite pleasure.  It would give taste for a life-time, and I should go home to Auchinleck with serene contentment.’

After stating that he is going to Geneva, he continues:—­

’I shall see Voltaire; I shall also see Switzerland and Rousseau.  These two men are to me greater objects than most statues or pictures.’  —­Nichols’s Literary History, vii. 318.

Superficiality of the French writers.

(Vol. i, p. 454.)

Gibbon, writing of the year 1759, says:—­

’In France, to which my ideas [in the Essay on the Study of Literature] were confined, the learning and language of Greece and Rome were neglected by a philosophic age.  The guardian of those studies, the Academy of Inscriptions, was degraded to the lowest rank among the three royal societies of Paris; the new appellation of Erudits was contemptuously applied to the successors of Lipsius and Casaubon; and I was provoked to hear (see M. d’Alembert, Discours preliminaire a l’Encyclopedie) that the exercise of the memory, their sole merit, had been superseded by the nobler faculties of the imagination and the judgment.’ —­Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, ed. 1827, i. 104.

A Synod of Cooks.

(Vol. i, p. 470.)

When Johnson spoke of ‘a Synod of Cooks’ he was, I conjecture, thinking of Milton’s ‘Synod of Gods,’ in Beelzebub’s speech in Paradise Lost, book ii. line 391.

Johnson and Bishop Percy.

(Vol. i, p. 486.)

Bishop Percy in a letter to Boswell says:  ’When in 1756 or 1757 I
became acquainted with Johnson, he told me he had lived twenty years in London, but not very happily.’ 
—­Nichols’s Literary History, vii. 307.

Barclay’s Answer to Kenrick’s Review of Johnson’s ’Shakespeare.’

(Vol. i, p. 498.)

Neither in the British Museum nor in the Bodleian have I been able to find a copy of this book. A Defence of Mr. Kenricks Review, 1766, does not seem to contain any reply to such a work as Barclay’s.