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Piozzi does not, so far as I know, deny it more than three years passed before Johnson was told of his rudeness. Baretti, in a MS. note on Piozzi Letters, ii. 12, says that the story was 'Mr. Cholmondeley's running away from his creditors. In this he is certainly wrong; yet if Mr. Cholmondeley had run away, and others gave the same explanation of the passage, his soreness is easily accounted for.
Piozzi and Madame de Staël should have so little realized the dignity of true womanhood as to have confirmed the fiat their tyrants had passed against them; and she vigorously condemns Lord Chesterfield's vicious system, which tends to the early acquirement of knowledge of the world and leaves but little opportunity for the free development of man's natural powers.
Johnson wrote on April 15: 'I am still very weak, though my appetite is keen and my digestion potent. ... I now think and consult to-day what I shall eat to-morrow. This disease likewise will, I hope, be cured. Piozzi Letters, ii. 362. Beattie, who dined with Johnson on June 27, wrote: 'Wine, I think, would do him good, but he cannot be prevailed on to drink it.
Supposing that our former mode of life kept us on the level, we shall, by the present contraction of expense, gain upon fortune a thousand a year, even though no improvements can be made in the conduct of the trade. Piozzi Letters, i. 66. Four years later, he writes: 'To-day I went to look into my places at the Borough. I called on Mr. Perkins in the counting-house.
Thrale gives a long but scarcely credible account of her quarrel with Baretti. It is very unlikely that he used to say to her eldest daughter 'that, if her mother died in a lying-in which happened while he lived here, he hoped Mr. Thrale would marry Miss Whitbred, who would be a pretty companion for her, and not tyrannical and overbearing like me. Hayward's Piozzi, ii. 336.
Johnson, when asked to hear Robertson preach, said: 'I will hear him if he will get up into a tree and preach; but I will not give a sanction by my presence to a Presbyterian assembly. Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 27. See also Ib. Nov. 7. Mrs. Piozzi confidently mentions this as having passed in Scotland, Anecdotes, p. 62. See Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. xiv. See ante, p. 191.
The lake below was beating its bank by a gentle wind.... In one part of the way we had trees on both sides for perhaps half a mile. Such a length of shade, perhaps, Scotland cannot shew in any other place. Piozzi Letters, i. 123. The travellers must have passed close by the cottage where James Mackintosh was living, a child of seven. Boswell refers, I think, to a passage in act iv. sc.
We had both seen Stonehenge this summer for the first time. Piozzi Letters, ii.315. Salisbury is eighty-two miles from Cornhill by the old coach-road. Johnson seems to have been nearly fifteen hours on the journey. 'Aug. 13, 1783. I am now broken with disease, without the alleviation of familiar friendship or domestic society.
'His inquisitiveness, he said, 'is seconded by great activity. Works, ix. 8. On Oct. 7 he wrote from Skye: 'Boswell will praise my resolution and perseverance; and I shall in return celebrate his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness.... It is very convenient to travel with him, for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect. Piozzi Letters, i. 198. He told Mrs.
Johnson, in describing Sir A. Macdonald's house in Sky, said: 'The Lady had not the common decencies of her tea-table; we picked up our sugar with our fingers. Piozzi Letters, i.138. Chambers says that 'James's Court, till the building of the New Town, was inhabited by a select set of gentlemen.
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