[173] Goldsmith, in his Present State of Polite Learning, published in 1759, says, (ch. x):—'When the great Somers was at the helm, patronage was fashionable among our nobility ... Since the days of a certain prime minister of inglorious memory [Sir Robert Walpole] the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. ... The author, when unpatronised by the Great, has naturally recourse to the bookseller. There cannot be perhaps imagined a combination more prejudicial to taste than this. It is the interest of the one to allow as little for writing, and of the other to write as much as possible; accordingly tedious compilations and periodical magazines are the result of their joint endeavours.'
[174] In the first number of The Rambler, Johnson shews how attractive to an author is the form of publication which he was himself then adopting:—'It heightens his alacrity to think in how many places he shall have what he is now writing read with ecstacies to-morrow.'
[175] Yet he said 'the inhabitants of Lichfield were the most sober, decent people in England.' Ante, ii. 463.
[176] At the beginning of the eighteenth century, says Goldsmith, 'smoking in the rooms [at Bath] was permitted.' When Nash became King of Bath he put it down. Goldsmith's Works, ed. 1854, iv. 51. 'Johnson,' says Boswell (ante, i. 317), 'had a high opinion of the sedative influence of smoking.'
[177] Dr. Johnson used to practise this himself very much. BOSWELL.
[178] In The Tatler, for May 24, 1709, we are told that 'rural esquires wear shirts half a week, and are drunk twice a day.' In the year 1720, Fenton urged Gay 'to sell as much South Sea stock as would purchase a hundred a year for life, "which will make you sure of a clean shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day."' Johnson's Works, viii. 65. In Tristram Shandy, ii. ch. 4, published in 1759, we read:—'It was in this year [about 1700] that my uncle began to break in upon the daily regularity of a clean shirt.' In the Spiritual Quixote, published in 1773 (i. 51), Tugwell says to his master:—'Your Worship belike has been used to shift you twice a week.' Mrs. Piozzi (Journey, i. 105, date of 1789) says that she heard in Milan 'a travelled gentleman telling his auditors how all the men in London, that were noble, put on a clean shirt every day.' Johnson himself owned that he had 'no passion for clean linen.' Ante, i. 397.
[179] Scott, in Old Mortality, ed. 1860, ix. 352, says:—'It was a universal custom in Scotland, that, when the family was at dinner, the outer-gate of the court-yard, if there was one, and if not, the door of the house itself, was always shut and locked.' In a note on this he says:—'The custom of keeping the door of a house or chateau locked during the time of dinner probably arose from the family being anciently assembled in the hall at that meal, and liable to surprise.'
[180] Johnson, writing of 'the chapel of the alienated college,' says:—'I was always by some civil excuse hindered from entering it.' Works, ix. 4.
[181] George Marline's Reliquiae divi Andreae was published in 1797.
[182] See ante, ii. 171, and iv. 75.