merchant, and get from him a pint of cape (sic) wine and a penny roll. The man after some time returned and said the merchant would not let him have a roll—that he was not a baker, but had sent the wine. “Get you gone,” said Cuzzoni; “unless he sends me a roll I’ll have no wine.” “Well,” said the wine-merchant, on the boy’s return, “since she insists on it, there is a penny; go to the next baker’s and buy her a roll.” On getting her bread and wine she poured the cape (which cost a guinea) into a bowl, and crumbling the bread into it drank off the contents. Not many years afterwards Baretti saw her selling greens at a stall at Bologna.
May 8, 1789.—I little expected when I dined with the man mentioned in the preceding pages, that he would so soon be numbered with the dead. Baretti, on the day on which I met him at Mr. Courtenay’s, seemed in remarkably good health. He told us then I think that he was in his seventy-third year. He was very entertaining; and a good deal of that roughness for which he was formerly distinguished had gone off. He died last Tuesday, 6th instant, at his house in Edward Street, of gout in his stomach, of which he had complained but a few days. He was in indigent circumstances. He had a small pension of 80l. per annum which was his chief support. He had lately revised his dictionary and made it (as he told us at Mr. Courtenay’s) a much better work; the original having been copied from the dictionaries that had gone before. By re-trenching several faulty expressions, &c., he reduced
