[133] Dr. John Gregory, Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, died on Feb. 10 of this year. It was his eldest son James who met Johnson. 'This learned family has given sixteen professors to British Universities.' Chalmers's Biog. Dict. xvi. 289.
[134] See ante, i. 257, note 3.
[135] See ante, i. 228.
[136] See ante, ii. 196.
[137] In the original, cursed the form that, &c. Johnson's Works, i.21.
[138] Mistress of Edward IV. BOSWELL.
[139] Mistress of Louis XIV. BOSWELL. Voltaire, speaking of the King and Mlle. de La Vallière (not Valiere, as Lord Hailes wrote her name), says:—'Il goûta avec elle le bonheur rare d'être aimé uniquement pour lui-même.' Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. 25. He describes her penitence in a fine passage. Ib. ch. 26.
[140] Malone, in a note on the Life of Boswell under 1749, says that 'this lady was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett [in Peregrine Pickle], but Anne Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London.' She is mentioned in a note to Horace Walpole's Letters, 1. cxxxvi.
[141] Catharine Sedley, the mistress of James II, is described by Macaulay, Hist of Eng. ed. 1874, ii. 323.
[142] Dr. A Carlyle (Auto. p. 114) tells how in 1745 he found 'Professor Maclaurin busy on the walls on the south side of Edinburgh, endeavoring to make them more defensible [against the Pretender]. He had even erected some small cannon.' See ante, iii, 15, for a ridiculous story told of him by Goldsmith.