408 Minor Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson.
at the door, that about three quarters of an hour before, he had breathed his last. I am now writing in the room where his venerable remains exhibit a spectacle, the interesting solemnity of which, difficult as it would be in any sort to find terms to express, so to you, my dear Sir, whose own sensations will paint it so strongly, it would be of all men the most superfluous to attempt to '
I have (says Mr. W. E. Surtees) heard my grandmother, a daughter, by his first wife, of the Dean of Ossory 1 (who married secondly Miss Charlotte Cotterell), speak of Dr. Johnson, as having frequently seen him in her youth. On one occasion, probably about 1762-3, he spent a day or two in the country with her father, and went with the family to see the house of a rich merchant. The owner all bows and smiles seemed to exult in the opportunity of displaying his costly articles of virtu to his visitor, and, in going through their catalogue, observed, ' And this, Dr. Johnson, is Vesuvius Caesar.' My grandmother, then but a girl, could not suppress a titter, when the Doctor turned round, and thus, alike to the discomfiture of the merchant and herself, sternly rebuked her aloud, ' What is the child laughing at ? Ignorance is a subject for pity not for laughter.'
��BY DR. JOHN MOORE.
[From his Life of Smollett, prefixed to Smollett's Works, ed. 1797, vol. i. p. 154.]
In Boswell's Life of Johnson" 2 mention is made of an observa tion of his respecting the manner in which argument ought to be rated. As Mr. Boswell has not recorded this with his usual precision, and as I was present at Mr. Hoole's at the time mentioned by Mr. Boswell, I shall here insert what passed, of which I have a perfect recollection. Mention having been
1 John Lewis, Dean of Ossory, Cotterel. Life, i. 382; Letters, 11.310. married Johnson's friend Charlotte 2 Life, iv. 281.
made
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