93.
[1285] See ante, i. 187.
[1286] See post, p. 421, and Feb. 27, 1784.
[1287] See ante, i. 260, and post, June 4. 1781.
[1288] He wrote to Mrs. Thrale on April 11--'You are at all places of high resort, and bring home hearts by dozens; while I am seeking for something to say about men of whom I know nothing but their verses, and sometimes very little of them. Now I have begun, however, I do not despair of making an end.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 100.
[1289] See ante, ii. 5.
[1290] A writer in Notes and Queries (3rd S., viii. 197) points out that Johnson, writing to a doctor, uses a doctor's language. 'Until very lately solution of continuity was a favourite phrase with English surgeons; where a bone was broken, or the flesh, &c. cut or lacerated, there was a solution of continuity.' See ante, ii. 106, for laceration.
[1291] He died March 11, 1780, aged 40. Gent. Mag. 1780, p. 155.
[1292]
'Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca, Pallidula, rigida, nudula? Nec, ut soles, dabis joca.'
Adriani morientis ad animam suam.
'Poor little, pretty, fluttering thing, Must we no longer live together? And dost thou prune thy trembling wing, To take thy flight thou know'st not whither? Thy humorous vein, thy pleasing folly Lies all neglected, all forgot; And pensive, wavering, melancholy, Thou dread'st and hop'st thou know'st not what.' Prior.
In The Spectator, No. 532, is a letter from Pope to Steele on these 'famous verses which the Emperor Adrian spoke on his death-bed.' See in Pope's Correspondence (Elwin's Pope, vi. 394), this letter to Steele of Nov. 7, 1712, for his version of these lines.
[1293] See ante, ii. 246, note 1.
[1294] Mr. Beauclerk's library was sold by publick auction in April and May 1781, for L5011. MALONE. See post, May 8, 1781.
[1295] By a fire in Northumberland-house, where he had an apartment, in which I have passed many an agreeable hour. BOSWELL.
[1296] See post, iv. 31.
[1297] In 1768, on his birthday, Johnson recorded, 'This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy.' Ante, ii. 45, note 1.
[1298] Johnson had dated his letter, 'London, April 25, 1780,' and added, 'now there is a date; look at it.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 109. In his reply he wrote:--'London, May 1, 1780. Mark that--you did not put the year to your last.' Ib. p. 112.
[1299] An Address to the Electors of Southwark. Ib. p. 106. See post, p. 440.
[1300] The author of the Fitzosborne Letters (post, May 5, 1784, note). Miss Burney thus describes this evening:--'We were appointed to meet the Bishop of Chester at Mrs. Montagu's. This proved a very gloomy kind of grandeur; the Bishop waited for Mrs. Thrale to speak, Mrs. Thrale for the Bishop; so neither of them spoke at all. Mrs. Montagu cared not a fig, as long as she spoke herself, and so she harangued away. Meanwhile Mr. Melmoth, the Pliny Melmoth, as he is called, was of the party, and seemed to think nobody half so great as himself. He seems intolerably self-sufficient--appears to look upon himself as the first man in Bath, and has a proud conceit in look and manner, mighty forbidding.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 348.
[1301] Dr. John Hinchliffe. BOSWELL.
[1302] A kind of nick-name given to Mrs. Thrale's eldest daughter, whose name being Esther, she might be assimilated to a Queen. BOSWELL.
[1303] Mr. Thrale. BOSWELL.
[1304] In Johnson's Dictionary is neither dawling nor dawdling. He uses dawdle, post, June 3, 1781.
[1305] Miss Burney shews how luxurious a table Mr. Thrale kept. 'We had,' she records, in May 1779, 'a very grand dinner to-day, though nothing to a Streatham dinner, at the Ship Tavern [Brighton], where the officers mess, to which we were invited by the major and the captain.' As the major was a man of at least L8,000 a-year, and the captain of L4,000 or L5,000, the dinner was likely to be grand enough. Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 211. Yet when Mr. Thrale had his first stroke in 1779, Johnson wrote:--'I am the more alarmed by this violent seizure, as I can impute it to no wrong practices, or intemperance of any kind.... What can he reform? or what can he add to his regularity and temperance? He can only sleep less.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 49, 51. Baretti, in a MS. note on p. 51, says:--'Dr. Johnson knew that Thrale would eat like four, let physicians preach.... May be he did not know it, so little did he mind what people were doing. Though he sat by Thrale at dinner, he never noticed whether he eat much or little. A strange man!' Yet in a note on p. 49, Baretti had said that Thrale's seizure was caused by 'the mere grief he could not overcome of his only son's loss. Johnson knew it, but would not tell it.' See post, iv. 84, note 4.
[1306] Miss Burney.
[1307] I have taken the liberty to leave out a few lines. BOSWELL. Lines about diet and physic.
[1308] See ante, ii. 61, note 4.
[1309] The author of Fables for the Female Sex, and of the tragedy of The Gamester, and editor of The World. Goldsmith, in his Present State of Polite Learning (ch.