Boswell also has tried his hand at it; and a correspondent of the "Gentleman's Magazine" suggests that Johnson had in his mind an epigram on a young lady who appeared at a masquerade in Paris, habited as a Jesuit, during the height of the contention between the Jansenists and Molinists concerning free will:-- "On s'etonne ici que Calviniste Eut pris l'habit de Moliniste, Puisque que cette jeune beaute Ote a chacun sa liberte, N'est ce pas une Janseniste."[1] [Footnote 1: "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."] 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."