244 Anecdotes.
��himself lost some friends too, he observed Dr. Johnson believed not a syllable of the account : ' For 'tis so easy (says he) for a man to fill his mouth with a wonder, and run about telling the lie before it can be detected, that I have no heart to believe hurricanes easily raised by the first inventor, and blown forwards by thousands more.' I asked him once if he believed the story of the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake when it first hap pened : ' Oh ! not for six months (said he) at least : I did think that story too dreadful to be credited, and can hardly yet per suade myself that it was true to the full extent we all of us have heard '.'
Among the numberless people however whom I heard him grossly and flatly contradict, I never yet saw any one who did not take it patiently excepting Dr. Burney, from whose habitual softness of manners I little expected such an exertion of spirit : the event was as little to be expected. Mr. Johnson asked his pardon generously and genteelly, and when he left the room rose up to shake hands with him, that they might part in peace 2 . On another occasion, when he had violently provoked Mr. Pepys 3 , in a different but perhaps not a less offensive manner, till some thing much too like a quarrel was grown up between them, the moment he was gone, ' Now (says Dr. Johnson) is Pepys gone home hating me, who love him better than I did before ; he spoke in defence of his dead friend 4 ; but though I hope 7 spoke better who -spoke against him, yet all my eloquence will gain me nothing but an honest man for an enemy ! ' He did not how-
1 He wrote, I have no doubt, 2 Ib. iv. 49, n. 3.
the review in the Literary Magazine 3 William Weller Pepys, a Master
for 1756 (p. 22), of A True Account in Chancery, brother of Sir Lucas
of Lisbon since the Earthquake, in Pepys (Life, iv. 169), and father of
which it is stated that the destruc- Lord Chancellor Cottenham. Samuel
tion was grossly exaggerated. After Pepys, the author of the Diary, was
quoting the writer at lengt/h, he con- of the same family. Letters, ii. 136,
eludes : ' Such then is the actual, n. i.
real situation of that place which 4 The ( dead friend ' was Lord
once was Lisbon, and has been since Lyttelton. For Miss Burney's account
gazetically and pamphletically quite of this quarrel see Mme. D'Arblay's
destroyed, consumed, annihilated ! ' Diary, ii. 45, 82, 290, and Life, iv.
See Life, i. 309, n. 3. 65, n. I.
ever
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