[1303] Mr. Thrale. BOSWELL.
[1304] In Johnson's Dictionary is neither dawling nor dawdling. He uses dawdle, post, June 3, 1781.
[1305] Miss Burney shews how luxurious a table Mr. Thrale kept. 'We had,' she records, in May 1779, 'a very grand dinner to-day, though nothing to a Streatham dinner, at the Ship Tavern [Brighton], where the officers mess, to which we were invited by the major and the captain.' As the major was a man of at least £8,000 a-year, and the captain of £4,000 or £5,000, the dinner was likely to be grand enough. Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 211. Yet when Mr. Thrale had his first stroke in 1779, Johnson wrote:—'I am the more alarmed by this violent seizure, as I can impute it to no wrong practices, or intemperance of any kind…. What can he reform? or what can he add to his regularity and temperance? He can only sleep less.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 49, 51. Baretti, in a MS. note on p. 51, says:—'Dr. Johnson knew that Thrale would eat like four, let physicians preach…. May be he did not know it, so little did he mind what people were doing. Though he sat by Thrale at dinner, he never noticed whether he eat much or little. A strange man!' Yet in a note on p. 49, Baretti had said that Thrale's seizure was caused by 'the mere grief he could not overcome of his only son's loss. Johnson knew it, but would not tell it.' See post, iv. 84, note 4.
[1306] Miss Burney.
[1307] I have taken the liberty to leave out a few lines. BOSWELL. Lines about diet and physic.
[1308] See ante, ii. 61, note 4.
[1309] The author of Fables for the Female Sex, and of the tragedy of The Gamester, and editor of The World. Goldsmith, in his Present State of Polite Learning (ch. x.), after describing the sufferings of authors, continues:—'Let us not then aggravate those natural inconveniences by neglect; we have had sufficient instances of this kind already. Sale and Moore will suffice for one age at least. But they are dead and their sorrows are over.' Mr. Foster (Life of Goldsmith, ed. 1871, ii, 484) strangely confounds Edward Moore the fabulist, with Dr. John More the author of Zeluco.
[1310] Line of a song in The Spectator, No. 470. CROKER.
[1311] Hannah More, in 1783 (Memoirs, i. 286), describes 'Mrs. Vesey's pleasant parties. It is a select society which meets at her house every other Tuesday, on the day on which the Turk's Head Club dine together. In the evening they all meet at Mrs. Vesey's, with the addition of such other company as it is difficult to find elsewhere.'
[1312] Second Earl Spencer; the First Lord of the Admiralty under Pitt, and father of Lord Althorp who was leader of the House of Commons under Earl Grey.