[Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around.] The Oswego is a river which runs between Lakes Oneida and Ontario. In the Threnodia Augustalis, 1772, Goldsmith writes:—
Oswego’s dreary shores shall be my grave.
The ‘desarts of Oswego’ were familiar to the eighteenth-century reader in connexion with General Braddock’s ill-fated expedition of 1755, an account of which Goldsmith had just given in An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, 1764, ii. 202–4.
[marks with murderous aim.] In the first edition ‘takes a deadly aim.’
[pensive exile.] This, in the version mentioned in the next note, was ‘famish’d exile.’
[To stop too fearful, and too faint to go.] This line, upon Boswell’s authority, is claimed for Johnson (Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, 1887, ii. 6). Goldsmith’s original ran:—
And faintly fainter, fainter seems to go.
(Dobell’s Prospect of Society, 1902, p. 3).
[How small, of all, etc.] Johnson wrote these concluding ten lines with the exception of the penultimate couplet. They and line 420 were all—he told Boswell—of which he could be sure (Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, ut supra). Like Goldsmith, he sometimes worked his prose ideas into his verse. The first couplet is apparently a reminiscence of a passage in his own Rasselas, 1759, ii. 112, where the astronomer speaks of ‘the task of a king . . . who has the care only of a few millions, to whom he cannot do much good or harm.’ (Grant’s Johnson, 1887, p. 89.) ‘I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another,’ he told that ‘vile Whig,’ Sir Adam Fergusson, in 1772. ‘It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual’ (Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, 1887, ii. 170).
[The lifted axe.] Mitford here recalls Blackmore’s