[283] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 182; 93.
[284] She did, however, give some assistance to Johnson in the Lives of the Poets. ‘I have claims,’ she writes to Miss More (Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 191), ‘upon Dr. Johnson, but as he never knows me when he meets me, they are all stifled in the cradle; for he must know who I am before he can remember that I got him Mr. Spence’s manuscripts.’ These papers were of great use to Johnson, as he himself remarks (Lives 1. xxvii, ed. Hill). Boswell regrets (Life 4. 63) that Johnson did not make a more handsome acknowledgment; but Boswell seems to have been unaware of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection with the whole transaction. Mrs. Boscawen cannot be serious in what she writes of Johnson’s ignorance of her. A conversation with Johnson, in which she took part, is described in the Life (4. 98).
[285] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 129.
[286] Ib. 1. 179.
[287] Ib. 1. 192.
[288] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 190.
[289] Mrs. Boscawen was the subject of more than one literary tribute before this. Young’s dreary ode, Resignation, was addressed to her, on the death of Admiral Boscawen; Mrs. Montagu had taken the widow to the ancient poet for consolation. In this poem she is bidden to ‘go forth a moral Amazon, armed with undaunted thought.’ Perhaps the last of these poetical tributes was a sonnet (from which a selection is here printed for the first time), by Pye when poet laureate. Writing of her villa at Richmond, once the home of Thomson, the poet Pye says:
Still Fancy’s Train your verdant Paths shall trace,
Tho’ closed her fav’rite Votary’s dulcet lay;
Each wonted Haunt their footsteps still shall grace,