[402] Boswell, I suspect, quoted this passage from hearsay, for originally it stood:—'If he could have got the money, he could have counted it' (p. 68). In the British Museum there are copies of the first edition both softened and unsoftened.
[403] Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland's Islands. BOSWELL.
[404] By comparing the first with the subsequent editions, this curious circumstance of ministerial authorship may be discovered. BOSWELL.
[405] Navigation was the common term for canals, which at that time were getting rapidly made. A writer in Notes and Queries, 6th, xi. 64, shows that Langton, as payment of a loan, undertook to pay Johnson's servant, Frank, an annuity for life, secured on profits from the navigation of the River Wey in Surrey.
[406] It was, Mr. Chalmers told me, a saying about that time, 'Married a Countess Dowager of Rothes!' 'Why, everybody marries a Countess Dowager of Rothes!' And there were in fact, about 1772, three ladies of that name married to second husbands. CROKER. Mr. Langton married one of these ladies.
[407] The Hermit of Warkworth: A Ballad in three cantos. T. Davis, 25. 6d. Cradock (Memoirs, i. 207) quotes Johnson's parody on a stanza in The Hermit:
'I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
With his hat in his hand.'
'Mr. Garrick,' he continues, 'asked me whether I had seen Johnson's criticism on the Hermit. "It is already," said he, "over half the town."'
[408] '"I am told," says a letter-writer of the day, "that Dr. Goldsmith now generally lives with his countryman, Lord Clare, who has lost his only son, Colonel Nugent."' Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 228. 'The Haunch of Venison was written this year (1771), and appears to have been written for Lord Clare alone; nor was it until two years after the writer's death that it obtained a wider audience than his immediate circle of friends.' Ib p. 230. See post, April 17, 1778.
[409] Gibbon (Misc. Works, i. 222) mentions Mr. Strahan:—'I agreed upon easy terms with Mr. Thomas Cadell, a respectable bookseller, and Mr. William Strahan, an eminent printer, and they undertook the care and risk of the publication [of the Decline and Fall], which derived more credit from the name of the shop than from that of the author…. So moderate were our hopes, that the original impression had been stinted to five hundred, till the number was doubled by the prophetic taste of Mr. Strahan.' Hume, by his will, left to Strahan's care all his manuscripts, 'trusting,' he says, 'to the friendship that has long subsisted between us for his careful and faithful execution of my intentions.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 494. See ib. p. 512, for a letter written to Hume on his death-bed by Strahan.