would always have kept them concealed, could they of whom he knew the absurdities have been contented, in the common phrase, to keep their own counsel. But returning home one day from dining at the chaplain's[1] table, he told me, that Dr. Goldsmith had given a very comical and unnecessarily exact recital there, of his own feelings when his play was hissed[2]; telling the company how he went indeed to the Literary Club at night, and chatted gaily among his friends, as if nothing had happened amiss; that to impress them still more forcibly with an idea of his magnanimity, he even sung his favourite song about an old woman tossed in a blanket seventeen times as high as the moon; but all this while I was suffering horrid tortures (said he), and verily believe that if I had put a bit into my mouth it would have strangled me on the spot, I was so excessively ill; but I made more noise than usual to cover all that, and so they never perceived my not eating, nor I believe at all imaged to themselves the anguish of my heart: but when all were gone except Johnson here, I burst out a-crying, and even swore by —— that I would never write again. 'All which, Doctor (says Mr. Johnson, amazed at his odd frankness), I thought had been a secret between you and me! and I am sure I would not have said any thing about it for the world. Now see (repeated he when he told the story) what a figure a man makes who thus unaccountably chuses to be the frigid narrator of his own disgrace[3]. Il volto sciolto, ed i pensieri stretti[4], was a proverb made
- ↑ No doubt Percy, who was chaplain to George III. Letters, i. 414, n.
- ↑ The Good Natured Man. Though there was a good deal of hissing, especially at the 'uncommonly low language' of the scene of the bailiffs, yet 'it was played ten consecutive nights.' Forster's Goldsmith, ii. 98.
'It [the tragedy of Agamemnon] struggled with such difficulty through the first night that Thomson, coming late to his friends with whom he was to sup, excused his delay by telling them how the sweat of his distress had so disordered his wig that he could not come till he had been refitted by a barber.' Johnson's Works, viii. 372.
- ↑ 'A man (said Johnson) should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.' Life, ii. 472.
- ↑ 'At Sienna I was tabled in the house of one Alberto Scipioni, an old Roman courtier in dangerous times... At my departure towards
