=31= 14. =pity ... esteem.= The Thrales were not alone in overlooking these oddities. "His tricks and contortions, a subject for pity not ridicule," says Mr. Hoste, "were ignored by the celebrated wits and beauties who visited him in his gloomy 'den,' and by the duchesses and other distinguished ladies who gathered 'four and five deep' around him at fashionable assemblies, hanging on his sentences, and contended for the nearest places to his chair." =31= 15. =Southwark.= South of the commercial center of London and across the Thames. =31= 16. =Streatham.= About five miles southwest of London City. The Southwark apartment was in a commercial district; the Streatham apartment in a thinly settled residential suburb. =31= 34. =Maccaroni.= See _The Century Dictionary_ or Brewer's _Handbook of Phrase and Fable_. =32= 21. =Levett.= Of Levett, Goldsmith said to Boswell, "He is poor and honest, which is recommendation enough to Johnson." =32= 30. =the Mitre Tavern.= "The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street: but where now is its Scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, cock-hatted, potbellied Landlord; its rosy-faced, assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone! The becking waiter, that with wreathed smiles was wont to spread for Samuel and Bozzy their 'supper of the gods,' has long since pocketed his last sixpence; and vanished, six-pences and all, like a ghost at cockcrowing." Yet, Carlyle goes on to say, thanks to this book of Boswell's, "they who are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they yet speak." =33= 27. =Hebrides.= Locate these picturesque islands on the map. =34= 10. =Lord Mansfield.= William Murray, chief justice of the King's Bench from 1756 to 1788, has been called "the founder of English commercial law." =34= 23. =Macpherson.= In 1760 James Macpherson published what purported to be fragments of Gaelic verse with translations. These were so interesting that he was sent to the Highlands to hunt for more, and within three years he published the _Poems of Ossian_, consisting of two epics, "Fingal" and "Temora." Their genuineness has been discussed ever since. Evidently Johnson settled the matter to his own satisfaction and to Macaulay's, and you may be interested in what Boswell has to say. At the same time it seems clear that Johnson went too far in his charge of forgery. Macpherson probably did not find a complete epic, yet he undoubtedly found some Gaelic poetry. =34= 27. =contemptuous terms.= Boswell gives the following letter: MR. JAMES MACPHERSON, I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall not be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.