��Anecdotes.
��There was a Mr. Boyce too, who wrote some very elegant verses printed in the Magazines of five-and -twenty years ago x , of whose ingenuity and distress I have heard Dr. Johnson tell some curious anecdotes ; particularly, that when he was almost perishing with hunger, and some money was produced to purchase him a dinner, he got a bit of roast beef, but could not eat it without ketchup, and laid out the last half-guinea he possessed in truffles and mushrooms, eating them in bed too, for want of clothes, or even a shirt to sit up in.
��Another man for whom he often begged, made as wild use of his friend's beneficence as these, spending in punch the solitary guinea which had been brought him one morning ; when re solving to add another claimant to a share of the bowl, besides a woman who always lived with him, and a footman who used to carry out petitions for charity, he borrowed a chairman's watch, and pawning it for half a crown, paid a clergyman to marry him to a fellow-lodger in the wretched house they all inhabited, and got so drunk over the guinea bowl of punch the evening of his wedding-day, that having many years lost the use of one leg, he now contrived to fall from the top of the stairs to the bottom,
��1 Mrs. Piozzi places the publication of Samuel Boyse's verses about 1761 ; he died in 1749. In the Annual Register, 1764, ii. 54, a memoir of him is given. Having once pawned his clothes * he sat up in bed with the blanket wrapt about him, through which he had cut a hole large enough to admit his arm, and placing the paper upon his knee scribbled in the best manner he could the verses he was obliged to make.' When he got some of his clothes out of pawn, to supply the want of a shirt, ' he cut some white paper to slips, which he tied round his wrists, and in the same manner supplied his neck. In this plight he frequently appeared abroad with the additional inconvenience of the want of breeches.'
��Fielding, in Tom Jones (bk. vii. ch. i), which was published three or four months before Boyse's death, makes ' a very noble quotation ' from his poem of The Deity.
Johnson told Nichols that ' Boyse translated well from the French, but if any one employed him, by the time one sheet of the work was done he pawned the original. If the em ployer redeemed it, a second sheet would be completed, and the book again be pawned, and this perpetu ally. He had very little learning, but wrote verse with great facility, as fast as most men write prose.' Lit. Anec. ix. 777. See also Life, iv. 408, 442, and post in John Nichols's Anecdotes.
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