and the secret (for such I thought it)
discovered. I used to tell him in jest that his biographers would be
at a loss concerning some orange-peel he used to keep in his pocket,
and many a joke we had about the lives that would be published.
Rescue me out of their hands, my dear, and do it yourself, said he;
Taylor, Adams, and Hector will furnish you with juvenile anecdotes,
and Baretti will give you all the rest that you have not already, for
I think Baretti is a lyar only when he speaks of himself. Oh, said I,
Baretti told me yesterday that you got by heart six pages of
Machiavel's History once, and repeated them thirty years afterwards
word for word. Why this is a _gross_ lye, said Johnson, I never read
the book at all. Baretti too told me of you (said I) that you once
kept sixteen cats in your chamber, and yet they scratched your legs
to such a degree, you were forced to use mercurial plaisters for some
time after. Why this (replied Johnson) is an unprovoked lye indeed; I
thought the fellow would not have broken through divine and human
laws thus to make puss his heroine, but I see I was mistaken."

[Footnote 1: Sic in the MS. See _ante_, p. 202.]

On February 3rd, 1785, Horace Walpole writes from London to Sir
Horace Mann at Florence:--"I have lately been lent a volume of poems
composed and printed at Florence, in which another of our exheroines,
Mrs. Piozzi, has a considerable share; her associates three of the
English bards who assisted in the little garland which Ramsay the
painter sent me. The present is a plump octavo; and if you have not
sent me a copy by our nephew, I should be glad if you could get one
for me: not for the merit of the verses, which are moderate enough
and faint imitations of our good poets; but for a short and sensible
and genteel preface by La Piozzi, from whom I have just seen a very
clever letter to Mrs. Montagu, to disavow a jackanapes who has lately
made a noise here, one Boswell, by Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson. In a day
or two we expect another collection by the same Signora."

Her associates were Greathead, Merry, and Parsons. The volume in
question was "The Florence Miscellany." "A copy," says Mr. Lowndes,
"having fallen into the hands of W. Grifford, gave rise to his
admirable satire of the 'Baviad and Moeviad.'"

In his Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides, Boswell makes Johnson say
of Mrs. Montagu's "Essay on Shakespeare": "Reynolds is fond of her
book, and I wonder at it; for ne