The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [937]
907. a celebrated wit: John Wilkes.
908. Il n’a de l’esprit que contre Dieu: ‘He is witty only when he attacks God’ – a quip attributed to Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636–1711), and said to have been made at the expense of Francois Payot de Lignieres (1628–1704), a satirist who was at first Boileau’s friend, and then his adversary.
909. a physician: Dr Robert James.
910. A bookseller: Andrew Millar.
911. an eminent friend of ours: Edmund Burke.
912. a little girl: Boswell’s daughter Veronica.
913. Partem… renovarentur: I shaved my right arm next the wrist, and the skin round the right nipple, to discover how soon the hair would grow again.’
914. τò βγτιoν: The better.
915. quid valeant humeri: ‘What your shoulders can bear’ – Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 39.
916. aliis lcetus, sapiens sibi: Happy with others, wise when alone.
917. The Spleen, a Poem: See n. 601.
918. A gentleman: James Boswell.
919. a notorious infidel: Edward Gibbon.
920. a celebrated friend: Topham Beauclerk.
921. corrupted by evil communications: 1 Corinthians 15:33.
922. invented the other day: See p. 741.
923. one of the Prebendaries: The Revd Roger Barnston.
924. amor nummi: ‘Love of money’ – Juvenal, Satires, xiv.139.
925. Circe: In Homer’s Odyssey (x), Odysseus was detained for a year by the enchantress Circe on the island of Aeaea, where his companions were turned into swine.
926. In culpa… usquam: ‘The true culprit is the mind, which can never run away from itself – Horace, Epistles, I.xiv.13.
927. a gentleman: James Susannah Patton.
928. Delenda est Carthago: ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ – the sentence with which the elder Cato is said to have concluded every speech he made in the Senate.
929. nec… dabis joca: ‘Nor wilt thou play any longer as thou art wont’ – Hadrian, ‘Animula, vagula, blandula’.
930. manifestum habemus furem: We have caught the thief in the act.
931. a taylor’s daughter: Jenny Guest.
932. to ride with him now… : The ellipsis should read, ‘Captain Cotton who married Miss Aston’.
933. Fitzosborne’s Letters: William Melmoth, Letters on Several Subjects. By the late Sir Thomas Fitzosborne, Bart. (1748).
934. par pluribus: A host in herself.’
935. outrage… civilized country: In 1779 Lord George Gordon organized and made himself head of the Protestant associations formed to secure the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. He led a mob that marched on the Houses of Parliament on 2 June 1780, to present a petition against the Act. The ensuing riot lasted a week, causing great property damage and nearly 500 casualties. For his part in instigating this violence, Gordon was arrested on a charge of high treason, but he was acquitted on the ground that he had no treasonable intentions.
936. Sic fata ferunt: ‘The fates wrought to this end’ – Virgil, Aeneid, ii.34.
937. a young clergyman: The Revd Charles Lawrence.
938. O! preclarum diem: ‘O glorious day!’ – Cicero, De Senectute, 84.
939. Herculaneum: An ancient city at the base of Mount Vesuvius which was destroyed in the eruption of ad 79. Excavation of the site began in the eighteenth century, and the discoveries provided a rich and detailed vision of life in the ancient world which transformed men’s understanding of antiquity.
940. dactyl: A metrical foot consisting of a long syllable followed by two short (or, in modern verse, of an accented syllable and two unaccented) (OED).
941. Tu… non sei filosofo: ‘You are a saint, but you are not a philosopher.’
942. anfractuosities: Winding or tortuous crevices, channels, passages (OED).
943. gabble monstrously: Cf. The Tempest, I.ii.358–60, where Miranda tells Caliban ‘When thou didst not, savage, | Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like | A thing most brutish…’
944. High Life below Stairs: The Revd James Townley, High Life below Stairs (1759).
945. The Wonder: Susannah Centlivre, The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714).
946. The Thane of Ross: A minor role in Macbeth.
947. his grotto: Pope constructed a celebrated grotto (i.e. an excavation or structure made