harshness by the remark, that "he did not hate the persons he treated with roughness, or despise them whom he drove from him by apparent scorn. He really loved and respected many

whom he would not suffer to love him." Boswell echoes the remark, multiplies the instances, and then accuses Mrs. Piozzi of misrepresenting their friend. After mentioning a discourteous reply to Robertson the historian, which was subsequently con firmed by Boswell, she proceeds to show that Johnson was no gentler to herself or those for whom he had the greatest regard. "When I one day lamented the loss of a first cousin, killed in America, Prithee, my dear (said he), have done with canting: how would the world be worse for it, I may ask, if all your rela. tions were at once spitted like larks and roasted for Presto's supper?'- Presto was the dog that lay under the table." To this Boswell opposes the version given by Baretti, in the course of an angry invective, which Mr. Croker justly designates as brutal :

"Mrs. Thrale, while supping very heartily upon larks, laid down her knife and fork, and abruptly exclaimed, 'O, my dear Johnson! do you know what has happened? The last letters from abroad have brought us an account that our poor cousin's head was taken off by a cannon-ball.' Johnson, who was shocked both at the fact and her light, unfeeling manner of mentioning it, replied, Madam, it would give you very little concern if all your relations were spitted like those larks, and dressed for Presto's supper.'"

This version, assuming its truth, aggravates the personal rudeness of the speech. But her marginal notes on the passage are : "Boswell appealing to Baretti for a testimony of the truth is comical enough! I never addressed him (Johnson) so familiarly in my life. I never did eat any supper, and there were no larks to eat."

"Upon mentioning this story to my friend Mr. Wilkes," adds Boswell, "he pleasantly matched it with the following sentimental anecdote. He was invited by a young man of fashion at Paris to sup with him and a lady who had been for some time his mistress, but with whom he was going to part. He said to Mr. Wilkes that he really felt very much for her, she was in

such distress, and that he meant to make her a present of 200 louis d'ors. Mr. Wilkes observed the behavior of Mademoiselle, who sighed indeed very piteously, and assumed every pathetic air of grief, but ate no less than three French pigeons, which are as large as English partridges, besides other things. Mr. Wilkes whispered the gentleman, 'We often say in England, "Excessive sorrow is exceeding dry," but I never heard "Excessive sorrow is exceeding hungry." Perhaps one hundred will do.' The gentleman took the hint." Mrs. Piozzi's marginal ebullition is: "Very like my hearty supper of larks, who never eat supper at all, nor was ever a hot dish seen on the table after dinner at Streatham Park."

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Two instances of inaccuracy, announced as particularly worthy of notice, are supplied by an eminent critic," understood to be Malone, who begins by stating, "I have often been in his (Johnson's) company, and never once heard him say a severe thing to any one; and many others can attest the same." Malone had lived very little with Johnson, and to appreciate his evidence, we should know what he and Boswell would agree to call a severe thing. Once, on Johnson's observing that they had "good talk" on the "preceding evening," "Yes, Sir," replied Boswell, "you tossed and gored several persons." Do tossing and goring come within the definition of severity? In another place he says, "I have seen even Mrs. Thrale stunned;" and Miss Reynolds relates that "One day at her own table he spoke so very roughly to her, that every one present was surprised that she could bear it so placidly; and on the ladies withdrawing, I expressed great astonishment that Dr. Johnson should speak so harshly to her, but to this she said no more than, 'O, dear, good

One of the two instances of Mrs. Piozzi's inaccuracy is as follows: "He once bade a very celebrated lady (Hannah More) who praised him with too much zeal perhaps, or perhaps too strong an emphasis (which always offended him) consider what her flattery was worth before she choked him with it."

Now, exclaims Mr. Malone, let the genuine anecdote be contrasted with this:

"The person thus represented as being harshly treated, though

a very celebrated lady, was then just come to London from an obscure situation in the country. At Sir Joshua Reynolds's one evening, she met Dr. Johnson. She very soon began to pay her court to him in the most fulsome strain. 'Spare me, I beseech you, dear Madam,' was his reply. She still laid it on. Pray, Madam, let us have no more of this,' he rejoined. Not paying any attention to these warnings, she continued still her eulogy. At length, provoked by this indelicate and vain obtrusion of compliments, he exclaimed, 'Dearest lady, consider with yourself what your flattery is worth, before you bestow it so freely.'

"How different does this story appear, when accompanied with all those circumstances which really belong to it, but which Mrs. Thrale either did not know, or has suppressed!"

How do we know that these circumstances really belong to it? what essential difference do they make? and how do they prove Mrs. Thrale's inaccuracy, who expressly states the nature of the probable, though certainly most inadequate, provocation.

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The other instance is a story which she tells us, on Mr. Thrale's authority, of an argument between Johnson and a gentleman, which the master of the house, a nobleman, tried to cut short by saying, loud enough for the Doctor to hear, "Our friend has no meaning in all this, except just to relate at the Club to-morrow how he teased Johnson at dinner to-day; this is all to do himself honor." No, upon my word," replied the other, "I see no honor in it, whatever you may do." "Well, Sir," returned Mr. Johnson, sternly, "if you do not see the honor, I am sure I feel the disgrace." Malone, on the authority of a nameless friend, asserts that it was not at the house of a nobleman, that the gentleman's remark was uttered in a low tone, and that Johnson made no retort at all. As Mrs. Piozzi could hardly have invented the story, the sole question is, whether Mr. Thrale or Malone's friend was right. She has written in the margin: "It was the house of Thomas Fitzmaurice, son to Lord Shelburne, and Pottinger the hero."

"Mrs. Piozzi," says Boswell, "has given a similar misrepresentation of Johnson's treatment of Garrick in this particular (as to the Club), as if he had used these contemptuous expressions: 'If Garrick does apply, I'll blackball him. Surely one ought to sit in a society like ours

"Unelbowed by a gamester, pimp, or player.'

The lady retorts, "He did say so, and Mr. Thrale stood astonished." Johnson was constantly depreciating the profession of the stage.

Whilst finding fault with Mrs. Piozzi for inaccuracy in another place, Boswell supplies an additional example of Johnson's habitual disregard of the ordinary rules of good breeding in society:

"A learned gentleman [Dr. Vansittart], who, in the course of conversation, wished to inform us of this simple fact, that the council upon the circuit of Shrewsbury were much bitten by fleas, took, I suppose, seven or eight minutes in relating it circumstantially. He in a plenitude of phrase told us, that large bales of woollen cloth were lodged in the town-hall; that by reason of this, fleas nestled there in prodigious numbers; that the lodgings of the council were near the town-hall; and that those little animals moved from place to place with wonderful agility. Johnson sat in great impatience till the gentleman had finished his tedious narrative, and then burst out (playfully, however), 'It is a pity, Sir, that you have not seen a lion; for a flea has taken you such a time, that a lion must have served you a twelvemonth.'"

He complains in a note that Mrs. Piozzi, to whom he told the anecdote, has related it "as if the gentleman had given the natural history of the mouse." But, in a letter to Johnson, she tells him, "I have seen the man that saw the mouse," and he replies, "Poor V, he is a good man," &c.; so that her version of the story is the best authenticated. Opposite Boswell's aggressive paragraph she has written: "I saw old Mitchell of Brighthelmstone affront him (Johnson) terribly once about fleas. Johnson being tired of the subject, expressed his impatience of it with coarseness. Why, Sir,' said the old man, 'why should not Flea bite o' me be treated as Phlebotomy? It empties the capillary vessels."

6

Boswell's Life of Johnson was not published till 1791; but the controversy kindled by the Tour to the Hebrides and the Anecdotes raged fiercely enough to fix general attention and afford ample scope for ridicule: "The Bozzi, &c. subjects," writes Hannah More in April, 1786, "are not exhausted, though everybody

seems heartily sick of them. Everybody, however, conspires not to let them drop. That, the Cagliostro, and the Cardinal's necklace, spoil all conversation, and destroyed a very good evening at Mr. Pepys' last night." In one of Walpole's letters about the same time we find: :

The

"All conversation turns on a trio of culprits, Hastings, Fitzgerald, and the Cardinal de Rohan. . . . . So much for tragedy. Our comic performers are Boswell and Dame Piozzi. cock biographer has fixed a direct lie on the hen, by an advertisement in which he affirms that he communicated his manuscript to Madame Thrale, and that she made no objection to what he says of her low opinion of Mrs. Montagu's book. It is very possible that it might not be her real opinion, but was uttered in compliment to Johnson, or for fear he should spit in her face if she disagreed with him; but how will she get over her not objecting to the passage remaining? She must have known, by knowing Boswell, and by having a similar intention herself, that his 'Anecdotes' would certainly be published: in short, the ridiculous woman will be strangely disappointed. As she must have heard that the whole first impression of her book was sold the first day, no doubt she expected on her landing to be received like the governor of Gibraltar, and to find the road strewed with branches of palm. She, and Boswell, and their Hero are the joke of the public. A Dr. Walcot, soi-disant Peter Pindar, has published a burlesque eclogue, in which Boswell and the Signora are the interlocutors, and all the absurdest passages in the works of both are ridiculed. The print-shops teem with satiric prints in them one in which Boswell, as a monkey, is riding on Johnson, the bear, has this witty inscription, My Friend delineavit.' But enough of these mountebanks."

What Walpole calls the absurdest passages are precisely those which possess most interest for posterity; namely, the minute personal details, which bring Johnson home to the mind's eye. Peter Pindar, however, was simply acting in his vocation when he made the best of them, as in the following lines. His satire is in the form of a Town Eclogue, in which Bozzy and Piozzi contend in anecdotes, with Hawkins for umpire : —