��Extracts from James Boswell's Letters
��to praise the clearness and accuracy of your dramatic history ; and Windham found fault with you for not taking the profits of so laborious a work. Sir Joshua is pleased, though he would gladly have seen more disquisition you understand me ! Mr. Daines Barrington J is exceedingly gratified. He regrets that there should be a dryness between you and Steevens 2 , as you have treated him with great respect. I understand that, in a short time, there will not be one of your books to be had for love or money.
Dec. 7. I dined last Saturday at Sir Joshua's with Mr. Burke, his lady, son, and niece, Lord Palmerston, Windham, Dr. Lawrence 3 , Dr. Blagden 4 , Dr. Burney, Sir Abraham Hume, Sir William Scott 5 . I sat next to young Burke at dinner,
��had a right to tax America, Burke, instead of answering his arguments, would, if seated next to him, turn away in such a manner as to throw the end of his own tail into the face of the arguer."' Personal and Literary Memorials, p. 63. Burke no doubt wore his hair tied up in a pig-tail.
1 Barrington was not a member of the Literary Club. He had belonged to Johnson's Essex Head Club. Life, iv. 254.
2 Steevens, five years earlier, had taken offence at some notes on Shakespeare which Malone furnished to Isaac Reid. Prior's Malone, p. 122. Malone wrote to Lord Charlemont on Nov. 15, 1793, about Steevens's last edition of Shakespeare : * In my new edition I mean to throw down the gauntlet, not by the hints and hesitations of oblique deprecia tion, as he has on all occasions served me in his late book, but by a fair and direct attack.' Hist. MSS. Com., Thirteenth Report, App. viii. 221.
3 Not Johnson's friend, the physi cian, who had been dead some years, but Dr. French Lawrence, the
��Civilian, whose correspondence with Burke was published in 1827.
4 'Talking of Dr. Blagden's co piousness and precision of communi cation, Dr. Johnson said: "Blagden, Sir, is a delightful fellow." ' Life, iv. 30. Charlotte Burney describes him at a Twelfth Night Ball in 1784 as ' too elegant to undergo the fatigue of dancing.' Early Diary of F. Burney, ii. 316. Hannah More {Memoirs, ii. 98) met him at Mrs. Montagu's in 1788: 'He is (she wrote) a new blue-stocking and a very agreeable one. He is Secretary to the Royal Society.' Later on he became Sir Charles Blagden.
5 To many of these guests Sir Joshua, who died on Feb. 23, 1792, left bequests to Burke, ^2000, with the cancelling of a bond for the same amount borrowed ; to young Burke, a miniature of Oliver Cromwell ; to Lord Palmerston, the second choice of any picture of his own painting ; to Sir Abraham Hume, the choice of his Claude Lorraines ; and to Boswell ^200 to be expended in the purchase of one of his pictures.
Malone too, and Burke, as executors,
who
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