'The words of advice' which were given to Mr. Thrale the day before the fatal fit seized him, were that he should abstain from full meals. Ante, iv. 84, note 4. Johnson's resentment of Taylor's advice may account for the absence of his name in his will.
[F-13] They were sold in 650 Lots, in a four days' sale. Besides the books there were 146 portraits, of which 61 were framed and glazed. These prints in their frames were sold in lots of 4, 8, and even 10 together, though certainly some of them—and perhaps many—were engravings from Reynolds. The Catalogue of the sale is in the Bodleian Library.
APPENDIX G.
(Notes on Boswell's note on page 408.)
[G-1] Mrs. Piozzi records (Anecdotes, p. 120) that Johnson told her,—
'When Boyse was almost perishing with hunger, and some money was produced to purchase him a dinner, he got a bit of roast beef, but could not eat it without ketch-up; and laid out the last half-guinea he possessed in truffles and mushrooms, eating them in bed too, for want of clothes, or even a shirt to sit up in.'
Hawkins (Life, p. 159) gives 1740 as the year of Boyse's destitution.
'He was,' he says, 'confined to a bed which had no sheets; here, to procure food, he wrote; his posture sitting up in bed, his only covering a blanket, in which a hole was made to admit of the employment of his arm.'
Two years later Boyse wrote the following verses to Cave from a spunging-house:—