"]
reference to the flattery lavished on Garrick by Lord Mansfield and
Lord Chatham, Johnson had said, "When he whom everybody else
flatters, flatters me, then I am truly happy." _Mrs. Thrale_. "The
sentiment is in Congreve, I think." _Johnson_. "Yes, Madam, in 'The
Way of the World.'
"'If there's delight in love, 'tis when I see
The heart that others bleed for, bleed for me.'"
When Johnson is reported saying, "Those who have a style of
distinguished excellence can always be distinguished," she objects:
"It seems not. The lines always quoted as Dryden's, beginning,
'To die is landing on some silent shore,'
are Garth's after all." Johnson would have been still less pleased at
her discovery that a line in his epitaph on Phillips,
"Till angels wake thee with a note like thine,"
was imitated from Pope's
"And saints embrace thee with a love like mine."
In one of her letters to him (June, 1782) she writes: "Meantime let
us be as _merry_ as reading Burton upon _Melancholy_ will make us.
You bid me study that book in your absence, and now, what have I
found? Why, I have found, or fancied, that he has been cruelly
plundered: that Milton's first idea of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso'
were suggested by the verses at the beginning; that Savage's speech
of Suicide in the 'Wanderer' grew up out of a passage you probably
remember towards the 216th page; that Swift's tale of the woman that
holds water in her mouth, to regain her husband's love by silence,
had its source in the same farrago; and that there is an odd
similitude between my Lord's trick upon Sly the Tinker, in
Shakspeare's 'Taming of the Shrew,' and some stuff I have been
reading in Burton.
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