1781 he desired Dr. Jones to give him an account of it, saying, it was by far the largest tree of the kind he had ever seen or heard of, and therefore wished to give an account of it in the Philosophical Transactions x .
From the attachment shown to it by the Doctor, it has ever since been regarded as little inferior in celebrity to Shakespeare's Mulberry, or the Boscobel Oak, and specimens of its wood have , been worked into vases and other ornaments. He once took an admeasurement of it with a piece of string, assisted by a little boy, to whom he gave half a crown for his trouble. The dimensions of the willow in 1781, taken by Dr. Trevor Jones, and communicated in a letter to Dr. Johnson, are as follows : 1 The trunk rises to the height of twelve feet eight inches, and is then divided into fifteen large ascending branches, which, in very numerous and crowded subdivisions, spread at the top in a circular form, not unlike the appearance of a shady oak, inclining a little towards the east. The circumference of the trunk at the bottom is sixteen feet, in the middle eleven feet, and at the top, immediately below the branches, thirteen feet. The entire height of the tree is forty-nine feet, overshadowing a plain not far short of four thousand feet V
��ADAM SMITH ON DR. JOHNSON.
[From The Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer. By James Anderson. Edinburgh, 1791, 8vo. vol. iii. p. 2.]
Of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, Dr. Smith had a very contemptuous opinion 3 . 'I have seen that creature/ said he,
1 Life, ii. 40. of Johnson's Dictionary he speaks
2 A drawing of the tree is given in of ' the very extraordinary merit ' of the Gentleman's Magazine for 1785, the author. Ib. i. 298, n. 2. The Pre- p. 412. face to his Shakespeare he styled
3 ' Dr. Adam Smith once observed ' the most manly piece of criticism to me (writes Bos well) that "Johnson that was ever published in any knew more books than any man country.' Ante, ii. 307.
alive."' Life, i. 71. In his review For Johnson's 'unlucky altercation
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