x.), after describing the sufferings of authors, continues:--'Let us not then aggravate those natural inconveniences by neglect; we have had sufficient instances of this kind already. Sale and Moore will suffice for one age at least. But they are dead and their sorrows are over.' Mr. Foster (Life of Goldsmith, ed. 1871, ii, 484) strangely confounds Edward Moore the fabulist, with Dr. John More the author of Zeluco.
[1310] Line of a song in The Spectator, No. 470. CROKER.
[1311] Hannah More, in 1783 (Memoirs, i. 286), describes 'Mrs. Vesey's pleasant parties. It is a select society which meets at her house every other Tuesday, on the day on which the Turk's Head Club dine together. In the evening they all meet at Mrs. Vesey's, with the addition of such other company as it is difficult to find elsewhere.'
[1312] Second Earl Spencer; the First Lord of the Admiralty under Pitt, and father of Lord Althorp who was leader of the House of Commons under Earl Grey.
[1313] see ante p. 390.
[1314] Her childhood was celebrated by Prior in the lines beginning:-- 'My noble, lovely little Peggy.' CROKER.
[1315] Horace Walpole (Letters, vii. 510) wrote on Feb. 5, 1781:--'I saw Dr. Johnson last night at Lady Lucan's, who had assembled a blue stocking meeting in imitation of Mrs. Vesey's Babels. It was so blue, it was quite Mazarine-blue. Mrs. Montagu kept aloof from Johnson, like the west from the east.' In his letter of Jan. 14 (ib. p. 497), the allusion to Mrs. Vesey's Babels is explained: 'Mrs. Montagu is one of my principal entertainments at Mrs. Vesey's, who collects all the graduates and candidates for fame, where they vie with one another, till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at Babel.' 'Lady Spencer,' said Samuel Rogers, 'recollected Johnson well, as she used to see him often in her girlhood. Her mother, Lady Lucan, would say, "Nobody dines with us to-day; therefore, child, we'll go and get Dr. Johnson." So they would drive to Bolt Court and bring the doctor home with them.' Rogers's Table Talk, p. 10. 'I told Lady Lucan,' wrote Johnson on April 25, 1780, 'how long it was since she sent to me; but she said I must consider how the world rolls about her. She seemed pleased that we met again.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 107.
[1316] 'I have seen,' wrote Wraxall, 'the Duchess of Devonshire, then in the first bloom of youth, hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson's lips, and contending for the nearest place to his chair. All the cynic moroseness of the philosopher and the moralist seemed to dissolve under so flattering an approach.' Wraxall's Memoirs, ed. 1815, i. 158.
[1317] In Nichols's Lit. Anec. viii. 548, 9, Dr. Barnard is thus described:--'In powers of conversation I never yet knew his equal. He saw infinite variety of characters, and like Shakespeare adopted them all by turns for comic effect. He carried me to London in a hired chaise; we rose from our seat, and put our heads out of the windows, while the postboy removed something under us. He supposed himself in the pillory, and addressed the populace against the government with all the cant of No. 45 and Co. He once told me a little anecdote of the original Parson Adams, whom he knew. "Oh, Sir!" said he to Barnard, almost in a whisper, and with a look of horror, "would you believe it, Sir, he was wicked from a boy;" then going up close to him, "You will be shocked--you will not believe it,--he wrote God with a little g, when he was ten years old!"'
[1318] In Mr. Croker's editions, 'had taken a chair' is changed into 'had taken the chair,' and additional emphasis is given by printing these four words in italics.
[1319] The hostess must have suffered, for, according to Miss Burney, 'Lord Harcourt said, "Mrs. Vesey's fear of ceremony is really troublesome; for her eagerness to break a circle is such that she insists upon everybody's sitting with their backs one to another; that is, the chairs are drawn into little parties of three together, in a confused manner all over the room."' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 184. Miss Burney thus describes her:--'She has the most wrinkled, sallow, time-beaten face I ever saw. She is an exceeding well-bred woman, and of agreeable manners; but all her name in the world must, I think, have been acquired by her dexterity and skill in selecting parties, and by her address in rendering them easy with one another.' Ib. p. 244. She heard her say of a gentleman who had lately died:--'It's a very disagreeable thing, I think, when one has just made acquaintance with anybody and likes them, to have them die.' Ib. ii. 290.
[1320] Johnson passed over this scene very lightly. 'On Sunday evening I was at Mrs. Vesey's, and there was inquiry about my master, but I told them all good. There was Dr. Barnard of Eton, and we made a noise all the evening; and there was Pepys, and Wraxall till I drove him away.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 98. Wraxall was perhaps thinking of this evening when he wrote (Memoirs, ed. 1815, i. 147):--'Those whom he could not always vanquish by the force of his intellect, by the depth and range of his arguments, and by the compass of his gigantic faculties, he silenced by rudeness; and I have myself more than once stood in the predicament which I here describe.