Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/429

 By Mrs. Rose.

��pages, of which he uttered a few words of contempt that I have now forgotten. They were, however, carried to the author, who revenged himself by portraying Johnson as Rumble in his comedy of The Mausoleum x ; and subsequently he published, without his name, a Dialogue in the Shades between Lord Chesterfield and Dr. Johnson, more distinguished for malignity than wit. Being anonymous, and possessing very little merit, it fell still born from the press 2.

Dr. Johnson sent his Life of Lord Lyttelton in MS. to Mrs. Montagu, who was much dissatisfied with it, and thought her friend every way underrated ; but the Doctor made no alteration. When he subsequently made one of a party at Mrs. Montagu's, he addressed his hostess two or three times after dinner, with a view to engage her in conversation : receiving only cold and brief answers, he said, in a low voke, to General Paoli, who sat next him, and who told me the story, ' You see, Sir, I am no longer the man for Mrs. Montagu 3 .'

��Miss Seward.

" Ode, didactic, epic, sonnet, Mr. Hayley, you're divine."

Hayley.

" Ma'am, I'll take my oath upon it, You yourself are all the Nine.'"

Watson's Person, ed. 1861, p. 307.

' Hayley,' wrote Southey, ' has been worried as schoolboys worry a cat. I am treating him as a man deserves to be treated who was in his time, by popular election, king of the Eng lish poets,' &c. Southey's Corres. v. 179. 'I was born,' he adds, during his reign, and owe him some thing for having first made me ac quainted by name with those Spanish writers of whom I afterwards knew much more than he did.' Ib. p. 210. ' Lord Holland,' says Rogers ( Table Talk, p. 57), 'admires greatly the notes to his various poems.'

1 One of Plays of Three Acts, written for a Private Theatre.

��Gentleman's Magazine, 1784, p. 354.

2 Reviewed in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1787, pp. 520, 612. Miss Seward wrote to Hayley: 'You must learn to write below yourself, to veil those rays of imagination, wit and knowledge which illuminate your* writings, or it will always be in vain that you write anonymously.' Seward's Letters, &c., i. 302.

3 Life, iv. 64, 73 ; Letters, ii. 139, n. i ; ante, ii. 193.

Johnson had called the poet ' poor Lyttelton.' Works, viii. 491 ; Life, iv. 58, n. i. Horace Walpole wrote on March 3, 1781 : * Poor Lyttelton were the words of offence. Mrs. Vesey sounded the trumpet. It has not, I believe, produced any alter cation, but at a blue-stocking meet ing held by Lady Lucan, Mrs. Mon tagu and Dr.Johnson kept at different ends of the chamber, and set up altar against altar there. There she told me as a mark of her high displeasure, that she would never ask him to

Mrs.

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