[1343] '—sic fata ferebant.' Æneid, ii. 34.
[1344] Meaning his entertaining Memoirs of David Garrick, Esq., of which Johnson (as Davies informed me) wrote the first sentence; thus giving, as it were, the key-note performance. It is, indeed, very characteristical of its authour, beginning with a maxim, and proceeding to illustrate.—'All excellence has a right to be recorded. I shall, therefore, think it superfluous to apologise for writing the life of a man, who by an uncommon assemblage of private virtues, adorned the highest eminence in a publick profession.' BOSWELL.
[1345] Davies had become bankrupt. See ante, p. 223. Young, in his first Epistle to Pope, says:—
'For bankrupts write when ruined shops are shut
As maggots crawl from out a perished nut.'
Davies's Memoirs of Garrick, published this spring, reached its third edition by the following year.
[1346] I wish he had omitted the suspicion expressed here, though I believe he meant nothing but jocularity; for though he and I differed sometimes in opinion, he well knew how much I loved and revered him. BEATTIE.
[1347] The Thrales fled from Bath where a riot had broken out, and travelled about the country in alarm for Mr. Thrale's 'personal safety,' as it had been maliciously asserted in a Bath and Bristol paper that he was a Papist. Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 399.
[1348] On May 30 he wrote to Mrs. Thrale:—'I have been so idle that I know not when I shall get either to you, or to any other place; for my resolution is to stay here till the work is finished…. I hope, however, to see standing corn in some part of the earth this summer, but I shall hardly smell hay, or suck clover flowers.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 140.
[1349] It will, no doubt, be remarked how he avoids the rebellious land of America. This puts me in mind of an anecdote, for which I am obliged to my worthy social friend, Governour Richard Penn: 'At one of Miss E. Hervey's assemblies, Dr. Johnson was following her up and down the room; upon which Lord Abingdon observed to her, "Your great friend is very fond of you; you can go no where without him."—"Ay, (said she), he would follow me to any part of the world."—"Then (said the Earl), ask him to go with you to America.'" BOSWELL. This lady was the niece of Johnson's friends the Herveys [ante, i. 106]. CROKER.
[1350] Essays on the History of Mankind. BOSWELL. Johnson could scarcely have known that Dunbar was an active opponent of the American war. Mackintosh, who was his pupil, writes of him:—'I shall ever be grateful to his memory for having contributed to breathe into my mind a strong spirit of liberty.' Mackintosh's Life, i. 12. The younger Colman, who attended, or rather neglected to attend his lectures, speaks of him as 'an acute frosty-faced little Dr. Dunbar, a man of much erudition, and great goodnature.' Random Records, ii. 93.