tries as the following in Windham's _Diary_:-'Feb 7, 1784. Did
not rise till past nine; from that time till eleven, did little more
than indulge in idle reveries about balloons.' p. 3. 'July 20. The
greater part of the time, till now, one o'clock, spent in foolish
reveries about balloons.' p. 12. Horace Walpole wrote on Sept. 30
(_Letters_, viii. 505):--'I cannot fill my paper, as the newspapers do,
with air-balloons; which though ranked with the invention of navigation,
appear to me as childish as the flying kites of school-boys.' 'Do not
write about the balloon,' wrote Johnson to Reynolds (_post_, p. 368),
'whatever else you may think proper to say.' In the beginning of the
year he had written:--'It is very seriously true that a subscription of
L800 has been raised for the wire and workmanship of iron wings.'
_Piozzi Letters_, ii. 345.

[1105] It is remarkable that so good a Latin scholar as Johnson, should
have been so inattentive to the metre, as by mistake to have written
_stellas_ instead of _ignes_. BOSWELL.

[1106]

'Micat inter omnes
Julium sidus, velut inter ignes Luna minores.'
'And like the Moon, the feebler fires among,
Conspicuous shines the Julian star.'

FRANCIS. Horace, _Odes_, i. 12. 46.

[1107] See _ante_, iii. 209.

[1108]

'The little blood that creeps within his veins
Is but just warmed in a hot fever's pains.'

DRYDEN. Juvenal, _Satires_, x. 217.

[1109] Lunardi had made, on Sept. 15, the first balloon ascent in
England. _Gent. Mag_. 1784, p. 711. Johnson wrote to Mr. Ryland on Sept.
18:--'I had this day in three letters three histories of the Flying Man
in the great Balloon.' He adds:--'I live in dismal solitude.' _Notes and
Queries_, 5th S. vii. 381.

[1110] 'Sept. 27, 1784. Went to see Blanchard's balloon. Met Burke and
D. Burke; walked with them to Pantheon to see Lunardi's. Sept. 29. About
nine came to Brookes's, where I heard that the balloon had been burnt
about four o'clock.' Windham's _Diary_, p. 24.

[1111] His love of London continually appears. In a letter from him to
Mrs. Smart, wife of his friend the Poet, which is published in a
well-written life of him, prefixed to an edition of his Poems, in 1791,
there is the following sentence:-'To one that has passed so many years
in the pleasures and opulence of London, there are few places that can
give much delight.'

Once, upon reading that line in the curious epitaph q