[257] Perhaps among these ladies was the Miss Burnet of Monboddo, on whom Burns wrote an elegy.
[258] In the Rambler, No. 98, entitled The Necessity of Cultivating Politeness, Johnson says:—'The universal axiom in which all complaisance is included, and from which flow all the formalities which custom has established in civilized nations, is, That no man shall give any preference to himself.' In the same paper, he says that 'unnecessarily to obtrude unpleasing ideas is a species of oppression.'
[259] Act ii. sc. 5.
[260] Perhaps he was referring to Polyphemus's club, which was
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'Of height and bulk so vast The largest ship might claim it for a mast.' |
Pope's Odyssey, ix. 382.
Or to Agamemnon's sceptre:—
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'Which never more shall leaves or blossoms bear.' |
Iliad, i. 310.
[261] 'We agreed pretty well, only we disputed in adjusting the claims of merit between a shopkeeper of London and a savage of the American wildernesses. Our opinions were, I think, maintained on both sides without full conviction; Monboddo declared boldly for the savage, and I, perhaps for that reason, sided with the citizen.' Piozzi Letters, i. 115.