iversity Library at Cambridge, and the Advocates'
Library at Edinburgh. By the kindness of Mr. R. H. Soden Smith and Mr.
R. F. Sketchley, I have obtained the following extract from a copy in
the Dyce and Forster Libraries, in the South Kensington Museum:--

'Conscious, notwithstanding, that to avoid writing what is _unnecessary_
is, in these days, no just plea for silence in a biographer, I have some
apology to make for having strewed these pages so thinly with the
tittle-tattle of anecdote. I am, however, too proud to make this apology
to any person but my bookseller, who will be the only real loser by the
'Those readers, who believe that I do not write immediately under
his pay, and who may have gathered from what they have already read,
that I am not so passionately enamoured of Dr. Johnson's biographical
manner, as to take that for my model, have only to throw these pages
aside, and wait till they are new-written by some one of his numerous
disciples, who may follow his master's example; and should more anecdote
than I furnish him with be wanting (as was the Doctor's case in his
life of Mr. Gray), may make amends for it by those acid eructations
of vituperative criticism, which are generated by unconcocted taste and
intellectual indigestion.'--_Poems by William Whitehead_, York, 1788
(vol. iii, p. 128).

With this 'sneering observation,' which Boswell might surely have passed
over in silence, the Memoirs close.

_Michael Johnson as a bookseller._

(Vol. i, p. 36, n. 3.)

Mr. R. F. Sketchley kindly informs me that in the Dyce and Forster
Libraries at the South Kensington Museum there is a book with the
following title:--

_S. Shaw's 'Grammatica Anglo--Romana', London, printed for Michael
Johnson, bookseller: and are to be sold at his shops in Litchfield and
Uttoxiter in Stafford-shire; and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire,
1687._

Mr. C. E. Doble tells me that in the proposals issued in 1690 by Thomas
Bennet, St. Paul's Churchyard, for printing Anthony a Wood's _Athenae
Oxonienses_ and _Fasti Oxonienses_, among 'the booksellers who take
subscriptions, give receipts, and deliver books according to the
proposals' is 'Mr. Johnson in Litchfield.'

_The City and County of Lichfield_.

(Vol. i, p. 36, n. 4.)

'The City of Litchfield is a County of itself, with a jurisdiction
extending 10 or 12 miles round, which circuit the Sheriff rides every
year on Sept. 8.'--_A Tour through the Whole Island of Gre