He complains in a note that Mrs. Piozzi, to whom he told the anecdote, has related it “as if the gentleman had given the natural history of the mouse.”  But, in a letter to Johnson she tells him “I have seen the man that saw the mouse,” and he replies “Poor V——­, he is a good man, &c.;” so that her version of the story is the best authenticated.  Opposite Boswell’s aggressive paragraph she has written:  “I saw old Mitchell of Brighthelmstone affront him (Johnson) terribly once about fleas.  Johnson, being tired of the subject, expressed his impatience of it with coarseness.  ‘Why, Sir,’ said the old man, ’why should not Flea bite o’me be treated as Phlebotomy?  It empties the capillary vessels.’”

Boswell’s Life of Johnson was not published till 1791; but the controversy kindled by the Tour to the Hebrides and the Anecdotes, raged fiercely enough to fix general attention and afford ample scope for ridicule:  “The Bozzi &c. subjects,” writes Hannah More in April 1786, “are not exhausted, though everybody seems heartily sick of them.  Everybody, however, conspires not to let them drop. That, the Cagliostro, and the Cardinal’s necklace, spoil all conversation, and destroyed a very good evening at Mr. Pepys’ last night.”  In one of Walpole’s letters about the same time we find: 

“All conversation turns on a trio of culprits—­Hastings, Fitzgerald, and the Cardinal de Rohan....  So much for tragedy.  Our comic performers are Boswell and Dame Piozzi.  The cock biographer has fixed a direct lie on the hen, by an advertisement in which he affirms that he communicated his manuscript to Madame Thrale, and that she made no objection to what he says of her low opinion of Mrs. Montagu’s book.  It is very possible that it might not be her real opinion, but was uttered in compliment to Johnson, or for fear he should spit in her face if she disagreed with him; but how will she get over her not objecting to the passage remaining?  She must have known, by knowing Boswell, and by having a similar intention herself, that his ‘Anecdotes’ would certainly be published:  in short, the ridiculous woman will be strangely disappointed.  As she must have heard that the whole first impression of her book was sold the first day, no doubt she expected on her landing, to be received like the governor of Gibraltar, and to find the road strewed with branches of palm.  She, and Boswell, and their Hero, are the joke of the public.  A Dr. Walcot, soi-disant Peter Pindar, has published a burlesque eclogue, in which Boswell and the Signora are the interlocutors, and all the absurdest passages in the works of both are ridiculed.  The print-shops teem with satiric prints in them:  one in which Boswell, as a monkey, is riding on Johnson, the bear, has this witty inscription, ‘My Friend delineavit.’  But enough of these mountebanks.”

What Walpole calls the absurdest passages are precisely those which possess most interest for posterity; namely, the minute personal details, which bring Johnson home to the mind’s eye.  Peter Pindar, however, was simply labouring in his vocation when he made the best of them, as in the following lines.  His satire is in the form of a Town Eclogue, in which Bozzy and Madame Piozzi contend in anecdotes, with Hawkins for umpire: