relief may be obtained.

'I am, Sir, 'Your most humble servant, 'SAM. JOHNSON.' 'Bolt Court,
Fleet-street, 'Jan. 30, 1778.'

[1237] An ancestor of mine, a nursery-gardener, Thomas Wright by name,
after whom my grandfather, Thomas Wright Hill, was called, planted this
walk. The tradition preserved in my family is that on his wedding-day he
took six men with him and planted these trees. When blamed for keeping
the wedding-dinner waiting, he answered, that if what he had been doing
turned out well, it would be of far more value than a wedding-dinner.

[1238] The Rector of St. Chad's, in Shrewsbury. He was appointed Master
of Pembroke College, Oxford, in the following year. See _ante_, ii. 441.

[1239] 'I have heard Dr. Johnson protest that he never had quite as much
as he wished of wall-fruit except once in his life, and that was when we
were all together at Ombersley.' Piozzi's _Anec_. p. 103. Mrs. Thrale
wrote to him in 1778:--'Mr. Scrase gives us fine fruit; I wished you my
pear yesterday; but then what would one pear have done for you?' _Piozzi
Letters_, ii. 36. It seems unlikely that Johnson should not at Streatham
have had all the wall-fruit that he wished.

[1240] This visit was not to Lord Lyttelton, but to his uncle
[afterwards by successive creations, Lord Westcote, and Lord Lyttelton],
the father of the present Lord Lyttelton, who lived at a house called
Little Hagley. DUPPA. Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale in 1771:--'I would
have been glad to go to Hagley in compliance with Mr. Lyttelton's kind
invitation, for beside the pleasure of his conversation I should have
had the opportunity of recollecting past times, and wandering _per
montes notos et flumina nota_, of recalling the images of sixteen, and
reviewing my conversations with poor Ford.' _Piozzi Letters_, i. 42. He
had been at school at Stourbridge, close by Hagley. _Ante_, i. 49. See
Walpole's _Letters_, ix. 123, for an anecdote of Lord Westcote.

[1241] Horace Walpole, writing of Hagley in Sept. 1753 (_Letters_, ii.
352), says:--'There is extreme taste in the park: the seats are not the
best, but there is not one absurdity. There is a ruined castle, built by
Miller, that would get him his freedom even of Strawberry [Walpole's own
house at Twickenham]: it has the true rust of the Barons' Wars.'

[1242] 'Mrs. Lyttelton forced me to play at whist against my liking, and
her husband took away Johnson's candle that he wanted to read by at the
other end of