A peine étais-je entré, que ravi de me voir,
Mon homme, en m’embrassant, m’est venu recevoir;
Et montrant à mes yeux une allégresse entière,
Nous n’avons, m’a-t-il dit, ni Lambert ni Molière.
Lambert the musician, it may be added, had the special reputation of accepting engagements which he never kept.
[and t’other with Thrale.] Henry Thrale, the Southwark brewer, and the husband of Mrs. Thrale, afterwards Mrs. Piozzi. Johnson first made his acquaintance in 1765. Strahan complained to Boswell that, by this connexion, Johnson ‘was in a great measure absorbed from the society of his old friends.’ (Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, 1887, iii. 225.) Line 72 in the first edition reads—
The one at the House, and the other with THRALE.
[They both of them merry and authors like you.] ‘They’ should apparently be ‘they’re.’ The first version reads—
Who dabble and write in the Papers—like you.
[Some think he writes Cinna—he owns to Panurge.] ‘Panurge’ and ‘Cinna’ are signatures which were frequently to be found at the foot of letters addressed to the Public Advertiser in 1770–1 in support of Lord Sandwich and the Government. They are said to have been written by Dr. W. Scott, Vicar of Simonburn, Northumberland, and chaplain of Greenwich Hospital, both of which preferments had been given him by Sandwich. In 1765 he had attacked Lord Bute and his policy over the signature of ‘Anti-Sejanus.’ ‘Sandwich and his parson Anti-Sejanus [are] hooted off the stage’—writes Walpole to Mann, March 21, 1766. According to Prior, it was Scott who visited Goldsmith in his Temple chambers, and invited him to ‘draw a venal quill’ for Lord North’s administration. Goldsmith’s noble answer, as reported by his reverend friend, was—‘I can earn as much as will supply my wants without writing for any party; the assistance therefore you offer is unnecessary to me.’ (Life, 1837, ii. 278.) There is a caricature portrait of Scott at p. 141 of The London Museum for February, 1771, entitled ‘Twitcher’s Advocate,’ ‘Jemmy Twitcher’ being the nickname of Lord Sandwich.
[Swinging,] great, huge. ‘Bishop Lowth has just finished the Dramas, and sent me word, that although I have paid him the most swinging compliment he ever received, he likes the whole book more than he can say.’ (Memoirs of Hannah More, 1834, i. 236.)
[pasty.] The first version has Ven’son.’
[So there I sat, etc.] This couplet is not in the first version.