ANECDOTES
BY THE
��MARCH nth [1775]. It rained incessantly from the hour I awoke, that is, eight, till near twelve, that I went to bed, and how much further that night, I know not. This day I dined with the Club at the British Coffee [house] 2 , introduced by my old College friend Day. The President was a Scotch Member of Parliament, Mayne, and the prevalent interest Scottish. They did nothing but praise Macpherson's new history 3 , and decry Johnson and Burke. Day humorously gave money to the waiter, to bring him Johnson's Taxation no Tyranny. One of them desired him to save himself the expense, for that he should have it from him, and glad that he would take it away, as it was worse than nothing. Another said it was written in Johnson's manner, but worse than usual, for that there was nothing new in it.
1 From A Diary of a Visit to 3 ( The History of Great Britain England in 1775. By an Irishman from the Restoration to the Acces- (The Reverend Dr. Thomas Camp- sion of the House of Hanover. 2 vols. bell), with Notes by Samuel Ray- quarto, 2. is' Gent. Mag. 1775, mond, M.A., Prothonotary of the p. 192. Hume, writing to Strahan, Supreme Court of New South Wales. described it as ' one of the most Sydney: Waugh & Cox, 1854. For wretched Productions that ever came the question of the authenticity of from your Press.' Letters of Hume to this Diary see Life, ii. 338, n. 2. * In Strahan, p. 308. ' For Macpherson,' a marginal note Mrs. Thrale says of wrote Horace Walpole, * I stopped Dr. Campbell: " He was a fine showy dead short in the first volume; talking man, Johnson liked him of never was such a heap of insignifi- all things in a year or two." ' Hay- cant trash and lies.' Walpole's Let- ward's Piozzi, 2nd ed., i. 99. ters, vi. 202.
2 Life, ii. 195 ; iv. 179, n. I.
I4th.
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