Note 1 — LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MRS. PIOZZI.
Reading edition
"Menagiana," vol. iii. p. 376. Edition of 1716. Equally happy were Lord Chesterfield's lines to a young lady who appeared at a Dublin ball, with an orange breastknot:—
Mrs. Thrale took the lead even when her husband might be expected to strike in, as when Johnson was declaiming paradoxically against action in oratory: "Action can have no effect on reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument." Mrs. Thrale. "What then, Sir, becomes of Demosthenes' saying, Action, action, action?" Johnson. "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes, to a barbarous people." "The polished Athenians!" is her marginal protest, and a conclusive one.
In English literature she was rarely at fault. In
"Pretty Tory, where's the jest To wear that riband on thy breast, When that same breast betraying shows The whiteness of the rebel rose?"
White was adopted by the malcontent Irish as the French emblem. Johnson's epigram may have been suggested by Propertius:
"Nullus liber erit si quis amare volet."