[97] Pope's Prologue to Addison's Cato, 1. 4.
[98] 'Boswell is the first of biographers. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.' Macaulay's Essays, i. 374.
[99] See post, Sept. 17, 1777, and Malone's note of March 15, 1781, and Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 22, 1773. Hannah More met Boswell when he was carrying through the press his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. 'Boswell tells me,' she writes, 'he is printing anecdotes of Johnson, not his Life, but, as he has the vanity to call it, his pyramid. I besought his tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend, and begged he would mitigate some of his asperities. He said roughly: "He would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody." It will, I doubt not, be a very amusing book, but, I hope, not an indiscreet one; he has great enthusiasm and some fire.' H. More's Memoirs, i. 403.
[100] Rambler, No. 60. BOSWELL.
[101] In the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.
[102] 'Mason's Life of Gray is excellent, because it is interspersed with letters which show us the man. His Life of Whitehead is not a life at all, for there is neither a letter nor a saying from first to last.' Letters of Boswell, p. 265.
[103] The Earl and Countess of Jersey, WRIGHT.
[104] Plutarch's Life of Alexander, Langhorne's Translation. BOSWELL.
[105] In the original, revolving something.
[106] In the original, and so little regard the manners.