The Diary and Collected Letters of Madame D'Arblay, Frances Burney. Frances Burney
of his wife and family than Thrale, he but holds up a finger, he is obeyed.” (Boswell.)
18 Suspirius the Screech Owl. See “Rambler” for Oct. 9, 1750. (This is unjust to Goldsmith. The general idea of the character of Croaker, no doubt, closely resembles that of Suspirius, and was probably borrowed from Johnson; but the details which make the part so diverting are entirely of Goldsmith’s invention, as anyone may see by comparing “The Good-natured Man” with “The Rambler.”)
19 Mrs. Thrale tells a good story of Johnson’s irrational antipathy to the Scotch. A Scotch gentleman in London, “at his return from the Hebrides, asked him, with a firm tone of voice, ‘what he thought of his country?’ ‘That it is a very vile country, to be sure, sir,’ returned for answer Dr. Johnson. ‘Well sir!’ replies the other, somewhat mortified, ‘God made it!’ ‘Certainly he did,’ answers Mr. Johnson, again, ‘but we must always remember that He made it for Scotchmen; and—comparisons are odious.” Mr. S.—“but God made hell!”—(Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson)
20 Fanny’s step-mother.
21 Boswell prints these lines as follows:
“When first I drew my vital breath, A little minikin I came upon earth And then I came from a dark abode, Into this gay and gaudy world,”
22 Malone gives some further particulars about Bet Flint in a note to Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” She was tried, and acquitted, at the Old Bailey in September, 1758, the prosecutrix, Mary Walthow, being unable to prove “that the goods charged to have been stolen (a counterpane, a silver spoon, two napkins, etc.) were her property. Bet does not appear to have lived at that time in a very genteel style; for she paid for her ready-furnished room in Meard’s-court, Dean-street, Soho, from which these articles were alleged to be stolen, only five shillings a week.”
23 Margaret Caroline Rudd was in great notoriety about the year 1776, from the fame of her powers of fascination, which, it was said, had brought a man to the gallows. This man, her lover, was hanged in January, 1776, for forgery, and the fascinating Margaret appeared as evidence against him. Boswell visited her in that year, and to a lady who expressed her disapprobation of such proceedings, Johnson said: “Nay, madam, Boswell is right: I should have visited her myself, were it not that they have got a trick of putting every thing into the newspapers.”
24 Kitty Fisher—more correctly, Fischer, her father being a German—an even more famous courtesan, who enjoyed the distinction of having been twice painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds
25 The blind poetess, and inmate of Dr. Johnson’s house.
26 Michael Lort, D.D., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently Greek Professor. He was born in 1725, and died in 1799.
27 “I wished the man a dinner and sat still.”—Pope.
28 The Miss Palmers were the nieces of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Mary, the elder, married, in 1792, the Earl of Inchiquin, afterwards created Marquis of Thomond; the younger, Theophila (“Offy”), married Robert Lovell Gwatkin, Esq. One of Sir Joshua’s most charming pictures (“Simplicity”) was painted, in 1788, from Offy’s little daughter. Lady Ladd was the sister of Mr. Thrale.
29 Miss Thrale.
30 Edmund Burke, our “greatest man since Milton,” as Macaulay called him.
31 At Sir Joshua’s town house, in Leicester Square. The house is now occupied by Messrs. Puttick and Simpson, the auctioneers.
32 “de Mullin” is Mrs. Desmoulins, the daughter of Johnson’s godfather, Dr. Swinfen, a physician in Lichfield. Left in extreme indigence by the deaths of her father and husband, she found for many years an asylum in the house of Dr. Johnson, whom she survived.
33 Macbean was sometime Johnson’s amanuensis. His “Dictionary of Ancient Geography” was published in 1773, with a Preface by Johnson.
34 Robert Levett—not Levat, as Fanny writes it—was a Lichfield man, “an obscure practiser in physick amongst the lower people,” and an old acquaintance of Dr. Johnson’s, in whose house he was supported for many years, until his death, at a very advanced age, in 1782, “So ended the long life of a very useful and very blameless man,” Johnson wrote, in communicating the intelligence to Dr. Lawrence.
35 Boswell tells us nothing of Poll, except that she was a Miss Carmichael. Domestic dissensions seem to have been the rule with this happy family, but Johnson’s long-suffering was inexhaustible, On one occasion he writes Mrs. Thrale, “Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, who does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll loves none of them.”
36 The lives of Cowley and Waller, from Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets.” They were not published till 1781, but were already in print.
37 “The Theory and Regulation of Love: A Moral Essay.” By the Rev. John Norris, Oxford, 1688.
38 Miss Gregory was the daughter of a Scotch physician. She married the Rev. Archibald Alison, and was the mother of Sir Archibald Alison, the historian.
39 The house in which she died, in Portman Square.
40 No doubt Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet, a French author, who published numerous works, historical and political, both before and after this date.
41 In the original edition: perhaps “vexation” was the word intended.
42 Sir John Ladd, Mr. Thrale’s sister’s son, a young profligate who subsequently married, not Miss Burney, but a woman of the town! Dr. Johnson’s satirical verses on his coming of age are printed near the end of Boswell’s “Life.”
(1779)
THE AUTHOR OF “EVELINA” IN SOCIETY: SHE VISITS BRIGHTON AND TUNBRIDGE WELLS
(Fanny’s circle of acquaintance was largely extended in 1779, in which year she was introduced to Mrs. Horneck and her daughter Mary (Goldsmith’s “Jessamy Bride”), to Mr. and Mrs. Cholmondeley, to Arthur Murphy, the dramatist, and best of all, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his beautiful wife. The Hornecks and the Cholmondeleys she met at one of those delightful parties at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house in Leicester Square,—parties composed of the wisest and wittiest in English society of the day, though nowhere among the guests could there be found a man of more genuine worth or more brilliant genius than the mild-mannered host. Mrs. Horneck had been a noted beauty in her younger days, and she, as well as her two lovely daughters, had been painted by Sir Joshua. The elder daughter, Catherine (Goldsmith’s “Little Comedy”), was now (1779) Mrs. Bunbury, wife of Henry Bunbury the caricaturist. Mary, the younger, was at this time about twenty-six years of age, and was subsequently married to Colonel Gwynn, whom we shall meet with in Fanny’s Diary of her Life at Court. Goldsmith, it is said, had loved Mary Horneck, though the ugly little man never ventured to tell his love; but when he died, five years before her meeting with Fanny, the Jessamy Bride caused his coffin to be reopened, and a lock of hair to be cut from the dead poet’s head. This lock she treasured until her own death, nearly seventy years afterwards.
Mrs. Sheridan’s maiden name was Eliza Anne Linley. There is an interesting notice of her in Fanny’s “Early Diary” for the month of April, 1773. “Can I speak of music, and not mention Miss Linley? The town has rung of no other name this month. Miss Linley is daughter to a musician of Bath, a very sour, ill-bred, severe, and selfish man. She is believed to be very romantic; she has long been very celebrated for her singing, though never, till within this month, has she been in London.
“She has long been attached to a Mr. Sheridan, a young man of great talents, and very well spoken of, whom it is expected she will