Anecdotes by Hannah More.
��but he says it is not half so convenient as Bolt Court * He has just finished the Poets ; Pope is the last x . I am sorry he has lost so much credit by Lord Lyttleton's ; he treats him almost with contempt ; makes him out a poor writer, and an envious man 2 ; speaks well only of his * Conversion of St. Paul/ of which he says, ' it is sufficient to say it has never been answered V Mrs. Montagu and Mr. Pepys, his two chief surviving friends, are very angry 4 . Memoirs, i. 206.
London, 1781.
Tuesday we were a small and very choice party at Bishop Shipley's 5 . Lord and Lady Spencer 6 , Lord and Lady Al-
��citation of Mrs. Thrale, to a house in Grosvenor Square.' Life, iv. 72.
1 ' Some time in March [1781] I finished the Lives of the Poets.' Ante, i. 96. On March 5 he wrote to Strahan that he had done them. Letters, ii. 207. He did not in writing them keep to the order in which they were published.
2 Miss More, I suppose, is think ing of the passage in which it is said that ' Lyttelton's zeal was considered by the courtiers not only as violent, but as acrimonious and malignant.' Perhaps however she had in mind a passage in the Life of Shenstone. Works, viii. 410; ante, ii. 3, n.
3 Johnson describes it as ' a trea tise to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer.' Works, viii. 490.
4 Life, iv. 64, 65, n. i ; ante, i. 244.
5 Boswell records a dinner on Thursday, April 12, 'at a Bishop's, where were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Berrenger, and some more com pany.' He adds, ' I have unfor tunately recorded none of Johnson's conversation.' Life, iv. 88. If, as seems most likely, it was this same dinner, his failure to keep a record was, no doubt, due to his being 'much disordered with wine.' His journal he had not kept diligently
VOL. II. O
��for some weeks. I have little doubt that it was on Tuesday, as Miss More says, that the dinner took place. It was in Passion Week, and though Johnson made an * ingenious defence of his dining twice abroad in Passion Week' at the houses of Bishops (#.), yet I do not think he would have dined on the eve of Good Friday. On that day he wrote to Mrs. Thrale (who had just lost her husband) : * The business of Christians is now for a few days in their own bosoms.' Letters, ii. 214.
Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, Johnson described as * knowing and conversible ' (Letters, i. 400), and as a man * who comes to every place.' Ib. ii. 149.
He and Watson of Llandaff were the only Bishops who, at a meeting of their body convened by the Arch bishop of Canterbury in 1787, at the instance of Pitt, voted against the maintenance of the Test and Cor poration Acts. Life of Watson, i. 181.
Heber married his grand-daughter.
6 The first Earl Spencer. He died in 1783. ' He succeeded,' writes his grandson, * to an enormous property in money, as well as land, before he was of age ; and he died at forty-
thorpe
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