Note 971 — THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (continued 5)
Reading edition
On May 26, 1791, Walpole wrote of Boswell's Life of Johnson (Letters ix. 3l9):—'I expected amongst the excommunicated to find myself, but am very gently treated. I never would be in the least acquainted with Johnson; or, as Boswell calls it, I had not a just value for him; which the biographer imputes to my resentment for the Doctor's putting bad arguments (purposely out of Jacobitism) into the speeches which he wrote fifty years ago for my father in the Gentleman's Magazine; which I did not read then, or ever knew Johnson wrote till Johnson died.' Johnson said of these Debates:—'I saved appearances tolerably well; but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.' Ante, i. 504. 'Lord Holland said that whenever Boswell came into a company where Horace Walpole was, Walpole would throw back his head, purse up his mouth very significantly, and not speak a word while Boswell remained.' Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie, i. 155. Walpole (Letters, viii. 44) says:—'Boswell, that quintessence of busybodies, called on me last week, and was let in, which he should not have been, could I have foreseen it. After tapping many topics, to which I made as dry answers as an unbribed oracle, he vented his errand.'