��Anecdotes.
��guish the gentleman from the juggler. Dr. Johnson, as well as many of my acquaintance, knew that I kept a common-place book I ; and he one day said to me good-humouredly, that he would give me something to write in my repository. * I warrant (said he) there is a great deal about me in it : you shall have at least one thing worth your pains ; so if you will get the pen and ink, I will repeat to you Anacreon's Dove directly ; but tell at the same time, that as I never was struck with any thing in the Greek language till I read that, so I never read any thing in the same language since, that pleased me as much. I hope my translation (continued he) is not worse than that of Frank Fawkes V Seeing me disposed to laugh, ' Nay, nay (said he), Frank Fawkes had done them very finely.'
Lovely courier of the sky, Whence and whither dost thou fly? Scatt'ring, as thy pinions play, Liquid fragrance all the way: Is it business? is it love? Tell me, tell me, gentle Dove.
��1 Boswell in his Tour to the He brides, which was published before the Anecdotes, had not attacked Mrs. Piozzi, so that her attack on him would seem unprovoked. She sus pected him, however, of being the author of anonymous attacks in the newspapers. In the Life, iv. 343, he replies :
- I have had occasion several times,
in the course of this work, to point out the incorrectness of Mrs. Thrale, as to particulars which consisted with my own knowledge. But indeed she has, in flippant terms enough, expressed her disapprobation of that anxious desire of authenticity which prompts a person who is to record conversa tions, to write them down at the moment. Unquestionably, if they are to be recorded at all, the sooner it is done the better. . . . She boasts of her having kept a common-place book ; and we find she noted, at one time or other, in a very lively manner,
��specimens of the conversation of Dr. Johnson, and of those who talked with him; but had she done it re cently, they probably would have been less erroneous ; and we should have been relieved from those dis agreeable doubts of their authenticity, with which we must now peruse
' From 1776 to 1809 Mrs. Piozzi kept a copious diary and note-book called Thraliana? Hay ward's Pi ozzi, i. 6.
2 Francis Fawkes was the author of The Brown Jug. Campbell's British Poets, ed. 1845, p. 544. In 1761 he published Original Poems and Translations, for a copy of which on superfine paper Johnson subscribed. In conjunction with Woty, Fawkes published in 1763 The Poetical Calendar, to which Johnson contributed a character of Collins. Life, i. 382.
'Soft
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