593. Nor that… loose reins: Lord Rochester, ‘An Allusion to Horace’ (composed ?1675-6), ll. 34-6.
594. moribundus: Dying.
595. The Memoirs of Gray’s Life: William Mason, ed., The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are prefixed Memoirs of his life and writings by W. Mason, M.A. (1775).
596. for fear of Smollet: In 1748 Smollett had published a complete history of England, part of which was often reprinted as a continuation of Hume’s history of England.
597. Abel Drugger: A character in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) – a part in which Garrick was celebrated.
598. Comment… ce Grand Homme: ‘What! I don’t believe it. That isn’t Mr Garrick, that great man.’
599. a nobleman: Lord Shelburne.
600. A gentleman: Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican general.
601. The Spleen: Matthew Green, The Spleen (1737).
602. Socinian: A follower of, or pertaining to, a sect founded by Laslius and Faustus Socinus, two Italian theologians of the sixteenth century, who denied the divinity of Christ (OED).
603. a penurious gentleman: Sir Alexander MacDonald (c. 1745–95).
604. a well-known dramatick authour: Arthur Murphy.
605. by vinegar: Hannibal is said to have split the rocks which barred his way across the Alps by heating them and then sousing them in vinegar (Livy, xxi).
606. dialogue between Iago and Cassio: Othello, II.iii.
607. made his Odes… another man: Richard Cumberland dedicated his Odes (1776) to the then obscure painter George Romney.
608. a person: Edmund Burke.
609. a certain female political writer: Mrs Catherine Macaulay.
610. the father: Bennet Langton senior.
611. A literary lady of large fortune: Mrs Elizabeth Montagu.
612. a lady then at Bath: Miss Peggy Owen.
613. one of our friends: Bennet Langton.
614. experience proved the truth of it: A reference to Mrs Thrale’s later marriage to Gabriel Piozzi, which she undertook in the teeth of opposition from Johnson.
615. A gentleman: James Boswell.
616. Rowley’s Poetry: ‘Thomas Rowley’ was the fictional fifteenth-century poet to whom Thomas Chatterton attributed his fabricated medieval poems, first published in 1777.
617. Oscar: ‘The Death of Oscar’ was the first Ossianic fragment published by James Macpherson in 1759.
618. Respublicce… a bookseller’s work: The Respublicae Elzevirianae, a series in either 36 or 62 volumes which gave summary information about different countries. See n. 342.
619. Hutchinson: Francis Hutcheson.
620. a lady who knew Johnson welclass="underline" Possibly Mrs Thrale.
621. ‘asses of great charge’ introduced: Hamlet, V.ii.44. Johnson glosses the phrase as ‘Asses heavily loaded’; see n. 622.
622. ‘To be, or not to be,’ is disputable: Hamlet, III.i.58–90. Johnson’s note on this soliloquy begins, ‘Of this celebrated soliloquy, which bursting from a man distracted with contrariety of desires, and overwhelmed with the magnitude of his own purposes, is connected rather in the speaker’s mind, than on his tongue, I shall endeavour to discover the train, and shew how one sentiment produces another.’ The quotes come from Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare in eight volumes (1765). The best modern edition of the commentary is probably Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. B. H. Bronson and J. M. O’Meara (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986); however, the note on ‘asses of great charge’ is not reprinted in this selection.
623. A gentleman: George Steevens.
624. a splendid table: The Earl of Pembroke’s, at Wilton, near Salisbury.
625. a gentleman: James Boswell.
626. one of his political agents: Robert Scotland.
627. pars magna fui: ‘I was a large part’ – Virgil, Aeneid, ii.5.
628. mine own friend and my Father’s friend: Untraced.
629. Jack Ketch: A hangman.
630. patriotick friends: Johnson gave as the primary meaning of ‘patriot’ ‘One whose ruling passion is the love of his country’; but in the fourth edition of his Dictionary he supplemented that primary meaning with a secondary meaning, ‘It is sometimes used for a factious disturber of the government’, thereby alluding to the way in which, during his lifetime, patriotism had been invoked as the pretext for agitation which Johnson regarded as disaffected and mischievous.
631. indifferent…to go or stay: Joseph Addison, Cato (1713), V.i.40, p. 57 (where however the line reads, ‘Indifferent in his choice to sleep or die’).
632. Gretna-Green: The most southerly village in Scotland, and therefore the first place in which fugitives from England might be married according to Scottish law, which did not require parental assent for those who had not yet attained their majority.
633. One of the company: Edward Dilly.
634. A merry Andrew: A person who entertains people with antics and buffoonery; a clown (OED).
635. Scrub: A low comic character in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem.
636. Each… what they understand: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), ll. 66-7.
637. l’esprit du corps: The regard entertained by the members of a body for the honour and interests of the body as a whole, and of each other as belonging to it (OED, 2).
638. making Birnamwood march to Dunsinane: In Macbeth, V.iv-v.
639. The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty: Milton, ‘L’Allegro’, l. 36.
640. Off with his head… Aylesbury: Cf. Colley Cibber, The Tragical History of King Richard III (1735), p. 57.
641. Difficile… dicere: ‘It is difficult to speak of common things in your own way’ – Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 128.
642. Tuque… primus: Ibid., ll. 128–30; for the translation, see below (n. 644).
643. Epistola ad Pisones: An alternative, and technically more correct, way of referring to Horace’s Ars Poetica.
644. Si quid… aut operis lex: ‘If it is an untried theme you entrust to the stage, and if you boldly fashion a fresh character, make it the same at the end as it is at the beginning, and have it self-consistent. It is difficult to speak of common things in your own way; and it is more proper for you to spin into acts a song of Troy than if, for the first time, you were giving the world an unknown and unsung theme. You may acquire private rights in common ground, provided you will neither linger in the one hackneyed and easy round, nor trouble to render word for word, with the fidelity of the translator. Nor by your mode of imitating should you take the “leap into the pit” out of which shame, if not the law of your work, will forbid you to stir hand or foot to escape’ – ibid., ll. 125–35.