[He shifted his trumpet.] While studying Raphael in the Vatican in 1751, Reynolds caught so severe a cold ‘as to occasion a deafness which obliged him to use an ear-trumpet for the remainder of his life.’ (Taylor and Leslie’s Reynolds, 1865, i. 50.) This instrument figures in a portrait of himself which he painted for Thrale about 1775. See also Zoffany’s picture of the ‘Academicians gathered about the model in the Life School at Somerset House,’ 1772, where he is shown employing it to catch the conversation of Wilton and Chambers.
[and only took snuff.] Sir Joshua was a great snuff-taker. His snuff-box, described in the Catalogue as the one ‘immortalized in Goldsmith’s Retaliation,’ was exhibited, with his spectacles and other personal relics, at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883–4. In the early editions this epitaph breaks off abruptly at the word ‘snuff.’ But Malone says that half a line more had been written. Prior gives this half line as ‘By flattery unspoiled—,’ and affirms that among several erasures in the manuscript sketch devoted to Reynolds it ‘remained unaltered.’ (Life, 1837, ii. 499.) See notes to ll. 53, 56, and 91 of The Haunch of Venison.
[Here Whitefoord reclines.] The circumstances which led to the insertion of these lines in the fifth edition are detailed in the prefatory words of the publisher given at p. 92. There is more than a suspicion that Whitefoord wrote them himself; but they have too long been accepted as an appendage to the poem to be now displaced. Caleb Whitefoord (born 1734) was a Scotchman, a wine-merchant, and an art connoisseur, to whom J. T. Smith, in his Life of Nollekens, 1828, i. 333–41, devotes several pages. He was one of the party at the St. James’s Coffee-house. He died in 1810. There is a caricature of him in ‘Connoisseurs inspecting a Collection of George Morland,’ November, 16, 1807; and Wilkie’s Letter of Introduction, 1814, was a reminiscence of a visit which, when he first came to London, he paid to Whitefoord. He was also painted by Reynolds and Stuart. Hewins’s Whitefoord Papers, 1898, throw no light upon the story of the epitaph.
Cf. Romeo and Juliet, Act iii, Sc. 1:—‘Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.’ This Shakespearean recollection is a little like Goldsmith’s way. (See note to The Haunch of Venison, l. 120.)
[and rejoic’d in a pun.] ‘Mr. W. is so notorious a punster, that Doctor Goldsmith used to say, it was impossible to keep him company, without being infected with the itch of punning.’ (Note to fifth edition.)
[‘if the table he set on a roar.’] Cf. Hamlet, Act v, Sc. I.
[Woodfall,] i.e. Henry Sampson Woodfall, printer of The Public Advertiser. He died in 1805. (See note to l. 115.)
[Cross-Readings, Ship-News, and Mistakes of the Press.] Over the nom de guerre of ‘Papyrius Cursor,’ a real Roman name, but as happy in its applicability as Thackeray’s ‘Manlius Pennialinus,’ Whitefoord contributed many specimens of this mechanic wit to The Public Advertiser. The ‘Cross Readings’ were obtained by taking two or three columns of a newspaper horizontally and ‘onwards’ instead of ‘vertically’ and downwards, thus:—
Colds caught at this season are
The Companion to the Playhouse.
or