How small, of all, etc. Johnson wrote these concluding ten lines with the exception of the penultimate couplet. They and line 420 were all—he told Boswell—of which he could be sure (Birkbeck Hill’s _Boswell_, _ut supra_). Like Goldsmith, he sometimes worked his prose ideas into his verse. The first couplet is apparently a reminiscence of a passage in his own _Rasselas_, 1759, ii. 112, where the astronomer speaks of ‘the task of a king . . . who has the care only of a few millions, to whom he cannot do much good or harm.’ (Grant’s _Johnson_, 1887, p. 89.) ‘I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another,’ he told that ‘vile Whig,’ Sir Adam Fergusson, in 1772. ‘It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual’ (Birkbeck Hill’s _ Boswell_, 1887, ii. 170). The lifted axe. Mitford here recalls Blackmore’s Some the sharp axe, and some the painful wheel. The ‘lifted axe’ he also traces to Young and Blackmore, with both of whom Goldsmith seems to have been familiar; but it is surely not necessary to assume that he borrowed from either in this instance. Luke’s iron crown. George and Luke Dosa, or Doscha, headed a rebellion in Hungary in 1513. The former was proclaimed king by the peasants; and, in consequence suffered, among other things, the torture of the red-hot iron crown. Such a punishment took place at Bordeaux when Montaigne was seventeen (Morley’s Florio’s _ Montaigne_, 1886, p. xvi). Much ink has been shed over Goldsmith’s lapse of ‘Luke’ for George. In the book which he cited as his authority, the family name of the brothers was given as Zeck,—hence Bolton Corney, in his edition of the _ Poetical Works_, 1845, p. 36, corrected the line to— _Zeck’s_ iron crown, etc., an alteration which has been adopted by other editors. (See also Forster’s _Life_, 1871, i. 370.)