[417] Goldsmith wrote to Langton on Sept. 7, 1771:—'Johnson has been down upon a visit to a country parson, Doctor Taylor, and is returned to his old haunts at Mrs. Thrale's.' Goldsmith's Misc. Works, i. 93.
[418] While Miss Burney was examining a likeness of Johnson, 'he no sooner discerned it than he began see-sawing for a moment or two in silence; and then, with a ludicrous half-laugh, peeping over her shoulder, he called out:—"Ah, ha! Sam Johnson! I see thee!—and an ugly dog thou art!"' Memoirs of Dr. Burney, ii. 180. In another passage (p. 197), after describing 'the kindness that irradiated his austere and studious features into the most pleased and pleasing benignity,' as he welcomed her and her father to his house, she adds that a lady who was present often exclaimed, 'Why did not Sir Joshua Reynolds paint Dr. Johnson when he was speaking to Dr. Burney or to you?'
[419] 'Johnson,' wrote Beattie from London on Sept. 8 of this year, 'has been greatly misrepresented. I have passed several entire days with him, and found him extremely agreeable.' Beattie's Life, ed. 1824, p. 120.
[420] He was preparing the fourth edition, See _post, March 23, 1772.
[421] 'Sept. 18, 1771, 9 at night. I am now come to my sixty-third year. For the last year I have been slowly recovering both from the violence of my last illness, and, I think, from the general disease of my life: … some advances I hope have been made towards regularity. I have missed church since Easter only two Sundays…. But indolence and indifference has [sic] been neither conquered nor opposed.' Pr. and Med. p. 104.
[422] 'Let us search and try our ways.' Lamentations iii. 40.
[423] Pr. and Med. p. 101 [105]. BOSWELL.
[424] Boswell forgets the fourth edition of his Dictionary. Johnson, in Aug. 1771 (ante, p. 142), wrote to Langton:—'I am engaging in a very great work, the revision of my Dictionary.' In Pr. and Med. p. 123, at Easter, 1773, as he 'reviews the last year,' he records:—'Of the spring and summer I remember that I was able in those seasons to examine and improve my Dictionary, and was seldom withheld from the work but by my own unwillingness.'
[425] Thus translated by a friend:—
'In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove,
This Goat, who twice the world had traversed round,
Deserving both her masters care and love,
Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.'