In the notes to the Dunciad[937], we find the following verses, addressed to Pope[938]:—­

     ’While malice, Pope, denies thy page
        Its own celestial fire;
      While criticks, and while bards in rage
        Admiring, won’t admire: 

      While wayward pens thy worth assail,
        And envious tongues decry;
      These times, though many a friend bewail,
        These times bewail not I.

      But when the world’s loud praise is thine,
        And spleen no more shall blame;
      When with thy Homer thou shalt shine
        In one establish’d fame!

      When none shall rail, and every lay
        Devote a wreath to thee: 
      That day (for come it will) that day
        Shall I lament to see.’

It is surely not a little remarkable, that they should appear without a name.  Miss Seward[939], knowing Dr. Johnson’s almost universal and minute literary information, signified a desire that I should ask him who was the authour.  He was prompt with his answer:  ’Why, Sir, they were written by one Lewis, who was either under-master or an usher of Westminster-school, and published a Miscellany, in which Grongar Hill[940] first came out[941].’  Johnson praised them highly, and repeated them with a noble animation.  In the twelfth line, instead of ‘one establish’d fame,’ he repeated ‘one unclouded flame,’ which he thought was the reading in former editions:  but I believe was a flash of his own genius.  It is much more poetical than the other.

On Monday, June 14, and Tuesday, 15, Dr. Johnson and I dined, on one of them, I forget which, with Mr. Mickle, translator of the Lusiad, at Wheatley, a very pretty country place a few miles from Oxford; and on the other with Dr. Wetherell, Master of University-College.  From Dr. Wetherell’s he went to visit Mr. Sackville Parker, the bookseller; and when he returned to us, gave the following account of his visit, saying, ’I have been to see my old friend, Sack.  Parker; I find he has married his maid; he has done right.  She had lived with him many years in great confidence, and they had mingled minds; I do not think he could have found any wife that would have made him so happy.  The woman was very attentive and civil to me; she pressed me to fix a day for dining with them, and to say what I liked, and she would be sure to get it for me.  Poor Sack!  He is very ill, indeed.  We parted as never to meet again.  It has quite broke me down.’  This pathetic narrative was strangely diversified with the grave and earnest defence of a man’s having married his maid.  I could not but feel it as in some degree ludicrous.