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extracted from the Life of Mr. Samuel Boyse, who came to that city from the lighter air of Dublin. The description seems to me to prove two things: that the author was a Scot; and that, consciously or unconsciously, he had formed his literary style wholly on the Johnsonian model.

The personal obscurity of Mr. Boyse (during his residence in Edinburgh) might perhaps not be altogether owing to his habits of gloominess and retirement. Nothing is more difficult in that city than to make acquaintances. There are no places where people meet and converse promiscuously. There is a reservedness and gravity in the manner of the inhabitants which makes a stranger averse to approach them. They naturally love solitude; and are very slow in contracting friendships. They are generous; but it is with a bad grace. They are strangers to affability, and they maintain a haughtiness, and an apparent indifference, which deters a man from courting them. They may be said to be

The agreement with Cibber, which was seen by Peter Cunningham at Puttick’s auction-rooms on April 20, 1849, was dated November 13, 1752—exactly a week later than the above. In it Cibber undertook for £21 ‘to revise, correct, and improve a work now printing in four volumes,’ and to allow ‘that his name shall be made use of as the author of the said work, and be inserted accordingly in the title-pages thereof and in any advertisements relative to it.’
When the work appeared it was in five volumes, made up of twenty-five parts of three sheets each, so that at the agreed rate of payment Shiels would receive £56 5 s. The printer, Dan. Browne, was dead by 1754, in which year his widow sold his share for £50 to Griffiths and Johnston. (Bodleian Add. MSS. C. 86. 118.)
On the appearance of Johnson’s Lives in 1781 Griffiths wrote the following letter to Edmund Cartwright, inventor of the Power Loom:—


Turnham Green, June 16^th.

Dear Sir,—I have sent you a Feast! Johnson’s new volumes of the ‘Lives of the Poets.’ You will observe that Savage’s Life is one of the volumes. I suppose it is the same which he published