In the spring of the same year, soon after the appearance of Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes, Walpole wrote to Mann:
She and Boswell and their hero are the joke of the public. A Dr. Wolcot, soi-disant Peter Pindar, has published a burlesque eclogue,[439] in which Boswell and the signora are the interlocutors, and all the absurdest passages in the works of both are ridiculed. The print-shops teem with satiric prints on them: one, in which Boswell, as a monkey, is riding on Johnson, the bear,[440] has this witty inscription, ‘My friend delineavit.’—But enough of these mountebanks![441]
Other caricatures represented the ghost of Johnson haunting Boswell while he pieced together his Journal from various rags of reminiscence, and the bust of Johnson frowning down upon Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi as they wrote. Rowlandson and Collings later made the Tour the subject of a series of sixteen caricatures.
Boswell Haunted by the Ghost of Johnson
From a contemporary caricature
In 1786, moreover, a pamphlet appeared entitled, A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to his Friends, in which Boswell was satirized together with Strahan, Courtenay, and Mrs. Piozzi. The verses were elaborately annotated with quotations from the Journal, and Boswell was addressed by the manes of Johnson in these words:
How oft I mark’d thee, like a watchful cat,
List’ning to catch up all my silly chat;
How oft that chat I still more silly made,
To see it in thy commonplace conveyed.