Two instances of inaccuracy, announced as particularly worthy of notice, are supplied by “an eminent critic,” understood to be Malone, who begins by stating, “I have often been in his (Johnson’s) company, and never once heard him say a severe thing to any one; and many others can attest the same.”  Malone had lived very little with Johnson, and to appreciate his evidence, we should know what he and Boswell would agree to call a severe thing.  Once, on Johnson’s observing that they had “good talk” on the “preceding evening,” “Yes, Sir,” replied Boswell, “you tossed and gored several persons.”  Do tossing and goring come within the definition of severity?  In another place he says, “I have seen even Mrs. Thrale stunned;” and Miss Reynolds relates that “One day at her own table he spoke so very roughly to her, that every one present was surprised that she could bear it so placidly; and on the ladies withdrawing, I expressed great astonishment that Dr. Johnson should speak so harshly to her, but to this she said no more than ‘Oh, dear, good man.’”

One of the two instances of Mrs. Piozzi’s inaccuracy is as follows:—­“He once bade a very celebrated lady (Hannah More) who praised him with too much zeal perhaps, or perhaps too strong an emphasis (which always offended him) consider what her flattery was worth before she choaked him with it.”

Now, exclaims Mr. Malone, let the genuine anecdote be contrasted with this: 

“The person thus represented as being harshly treated, though a very celebrated lady, was then just come to London from an obscure situation in the country.  At Sir Joshua Reynolds’s one evening, she met Dr. Johnson.  She very soon began to pay her court to him in the most fulsome strain.  ‘Spare me, I beseech you, dear Madam,’ was his reply.  She still laid it on.  ’Pray, Madam, let us have no more of this,’ he rejoined.  Not paying any attention to these warnings, she continued still her eulogy.  At length, provoked by this indelicate and vain obtrusion of compliments, he exclaimed, ’Dearest lady, consider with yourself what your flattery is worth, before you bestow it so freely.’

“How different does this story appear, when accompanied with all those circumstances which really belong to it, but which Mrs. Thrale either did not know, or has suppressed!”

How do we know that these circumstances really belong to it? what essential difference do they make? and how do they prove Mrs. Thrale’s inaccuracy, who expressly states the nature of the probable, though certainly most inadequate, provocation.