she was also sister to the wife of his friend Mr. Gilbert Walmsley[1]. Besides his intimacy with the above-mentioned persons who were surely people of rank and education, while he was yet at Lichfield he used to be frequently at the house of Dr. Swinfen, a gentleman of a very ancient family in Staffordshire, from which, after the death of his elder brother, he inherited a good estate. He was, besides, a physician of very extensive practice; but for want of due attention to the management of his domestick concerns, left a very large family in indigence. One of his daughters, Mrs. Desmoulins, afterwards found an asylum in the house of her old friend, whose doors were always open to the unfortunate, and who well observed the precept of the Gospel, for he "was kind to the unthankful and to the evil[2]."'
In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted of an offer to be employed as usher in the school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire, to which it appears, from one of his little fragments of a diary, that he went on foot, on the 16th of July.—'Julii 16. Bosvortiam pedes petii[3].' But it
- ↑ Sir Thomas Aston, Bart., who died in January 1724-5, left one son, named Thomas also, and eight daughters. Of the daughters, Catherine married Johnson's friend, the Hon. Henry Hervey [Post, 1737]; Margaret, Gilbert Walmsley. Another of these ladies married the Rev. Mr. Gastrell [the man who cut down Shakspeare's mulberry tree, Post, March 25, 1776]; Mary, or Molly Aston, as she was usually called, became the wife of Captain Brodie of the navy. Malone.
- ↑ Luke vi. 35.
- ↑ If this was in 1732 it was on the morrow of the day on which he received his share of his father's property, ante, p. 93. A letter pub-
tête, but in a select company of which the present Lord Kilmorey was one. "Molly," says Dr. Johnson, "was a beauty and a scholar, and a wit and a whig; and she talked all in praise of liberty; and so I made this epigram upon her—She was the loveliest creature I ever saw—
Ut maneam liber—pulchra Maria vale.'
'Will it do this way in English, Sir,' said I:—
If freedom we seek—fair Maria, adieu!'
'It will do well enough,' replied he; 'but it is translated by a lady, and the ladies never loved Molly Aston.' Piozzi's Anec. p. 157. See Post, May 8, 1778.
