Baretti, his lordship, without paying much attention to the business, immediately and abruptly began with some very flimsy and boyish observations on the contested passage in Othello, “Put out the light,” &c. This was by way of showing off to Garrick, whose opinion of him however was not much raised by this impotent and untimely endeavour to shine on a subject with which he was little acquainted. Sir J. Reynolds, who had never seen him before (who told me the story), was grievously disappointed in finding this great lawyer so little at the same time.
Mr. Gibbon, the historian, is so exceedingly indolent that he never even pares his nails. His servant, while Gibbon is reading, takes up one of his hands, and when he has performed the operation lays it down, and then manages the other—the patient in the meanwhile scarcely knowing what is going on, and quietly pursuing his studies.
The picture of him painted by Sir J. Reynolds, and the prints made from it, are as like the original as it is possible to be. When he was introduced to a blind French lady, the servant happening to stretch out her mistress hand to lay hold of the historian’s cheek, she thought, upon feeling its rounded contour, that some trick was being played upon her with the sitting part of a child, and exclaimed, “Fidonc!”
Mr. Gibbon is very replete with anecdotes, and tells them with great happiness and fluency.
It would be very satisfactory if contemporaries would hand down to posterity their opinion concern-
