ANECDOTES AND REMARKS BY BISHOP PERCY
��[THE following anecdotes and remarks are taken from the third edition of Dr. Robert Anderson's Life of Johnson, published in 1815. They had been recorded by Percy, in 1805, in an interleaved copy of the second edition. A few of his entries are not worth reprinting ; others I have already in corporated as notes, and so do not include here.]
��AT Stourbridge Johnson's genius was so distinguished that, although little better than a school-boy, he was admitted into the best company of the place, and had no common attention paid to his conversation ; of which remarkable instances were long remembered there 1 . He had met even with George, afterwards Lord Lyttleton ; with whom, having some colloquial disputes, he is supposed to have conceived that prejudice which so improperly influenced him in the Life of that worthy noble man 2 . But this could scarcely have happened when he was a boy of fifteen, and, therefore, it is probable he occasionally
��1 Bridgenofth, Percy's birthplace, is only a few miles from Stourbridge. He was Johnson's junior by nineteen years.
2 Life, iv. 57. Ante, i. 257. Percy, who was chaplain to the King, devoted to the Duke of Northumberland, and whose wife had been nurse to Prince Edward (ante, ii. 64), was naturally shocked at Johnson's ridicule of a worthy
��nobleman but a poor writer. John son disliked moreover 'the most vulgar Whiggism' of Lyttelton's History of Henry II. Life, ii. 221. Hume wrote to Adam Smith on July 14, 1767 : ' Have you read Lord Lyttelton ? Do you not admire his Whiggery and his Piety; Qualities so useful both for this world and the next?' MSS. Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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