Note 284 — Chapter VIII · The London Salon

She did, however, give some assistance to Johnson in the Lives of the Poets. ‘I have claims,’ she writes to Miss More (Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 191), ‘upon Dr. Johnson, but as he never knows me when he meets me, they are all stifled in the cradle; for he must know who I am before he can remember that I got him Mr. Spence’s manuscripts.’ These papers were of great use to Johnson, as he himself remarks (Lives 1. xxvii, ed. Hill). Boswell regrets (Life 4. 63) that Johnson did not make a more handsome acknowledgment; but Boswell seems to have been unaware of Mrs. Boscawen’s connection with the whole transaction. Mrs. Boscawen cannot be serious in what she writes of Johnson’s ignorance of her. A conversation with Johnson, in which she took part, is described in the Life (4. 98).