The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [526]
‘I have sent a petitiona from Lucy Porter, with which I leave it to your discretion whether it is proper to comply. Return me her letter, which I have sent, that you may know the whole case, and not be seduced to any thing that you may afterwards repent. Miss Doxy perhaps you know to be Mr. Garrick’s niece.
‘If Dean Percy can be popular at Carlisle, he may be very happy. He has in his disposal two livings, each equal, or almost equal in value to the deanery; he may take one himself, and give the other to his son.
‘How near is the Cathedral to Auchinleck, that you are so much delighted with it? It is, I suppose, at least an hundred and fifty miles off. However, if you are pleased, it is so far well.
‘Let me know what reception you have from your father, and the state of his health. Please him as much as you can, and add no pain to his last years.
‘Of our friends here I can recollect nothing to tell you. I have neither seen nor heard of Langton. Beauclerk is just returned from Brighthelmston, I am told, much better. Mr. Thrale and his family are still there; and his health is said to be visibly improved; he has not bathed, but hunted.
At Bolt-court there is much malignity, but of late little open hostility.b I have had a cold, but it is gone.
‘Make my compliments to Mrs. Boswell, &c. I am, Sir, your humble servant,’
‘London, Nov. 13, 1779.’ ‘SAM. JOHNSON.’
On November 22, and December 21, I wrote to him from Edinburgh, giving a very favourable report of the family of Miss Doxy’s lover; – that after a good deal of enquiry I had discovered the sister of Mr. Francis Stewart, one of his amanuenses when writing his Dictionary; – that I had, as desired by him, paid her a guinea for an old pocket-book of her brother’s which he had retained; and that the good woman, who was in very moderate circumstances, but contented and placid, wondered at his scrupulous and liberal honesty, and received the guinea as if sent her by Providence. – That I had repeatedly begged of him to keep his promise to send me his letter to Lord Chesterfield, and that this memento, like Delenda est Carthago,928 must be in every letter that I should write to him, till I had obtained my object.
1780: yEtat. 71.] – In 1780, the world was kept in impatience for the completion of his Lives of the Poets, upon which he was employed so far as his indolence allowed him to labour.
I wrote to him on January 1, and March 13, sending him my notes of Lord Marchmont’s information concerning Pope; – complaining that I had not heard from him for almost four months, though he was two letters in my debt; – that I had suffered again from melancholy; – hoping that he had been in so much better company, (the Poets,) that he had not time to think of his distant friends; for if that were the case, I should have some recompence for my uneasiness; – that the state of my affairs did not admit of my coming to London this year; and begging he would return me Goldsmith’s two poems, with his lines marked.
His friend Dr. Lawrence having now suffered the greatest affliction to which a man is liable, and which Johnson himself had felt in the most severe manner; Johnson wrote to him in an admirable strain of sympathy and pious consolation.
‘TO DR. LAWRENCE
‘DEAR SIR, – At a time when all your friends ought to shew their kindness, and with a character which ought to make all that know you your friends, you may wonder that you have yet heard nothing from me.
‘I have been hindered by a vexatious and incessant cough, for which within these ten days I have been bled once, fasted four or five times, taken physick five times, and opiates, I think, six. This day it seems to remit.
‘The loss, dear Sir, which you have lately suffered, I felt many years ago, and know therefore how much has been