‘And nobody with me at sea but myself.’ This is almost a textual quotation from one of the letters of Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, to Lady Grosvenor, a correspondence which in 1770 gave great delight to contemporary caricaturists and scandal-mongers. Other poets besides Goldsmith seem to have been attracted by this particular lapse of his illiterate Royal Highness, since it is woven into a ballad printed in _The Public Advertiser_ for August 2 in the above year:— The Miser who wakes in a Fright for his Pelf, And finds _no one by him except his own Self_, etc. When come to the place, etc. Cf. Boileau, _ut supra_, ll. 31–4:— A peine étais-je entré, que ravi de me voir, Mon homme, en m’embrassant, m’est venu recevoir; Et montrant à mes yeux une allégresse entière, Nous n’avons, m’a-t-il dit, ni Lambert ni Molière. Lambert the musician, it may be added, had the special reputation of accepting engagements which he never kept. and t’other with Thrale. Henry Thrale, the Southwark brewer, and the husband of Mrs. Thrale, afterwards Mrs. Piozzi. Johnson first made his acquaintance in 1765. Strahan complained to Boswell that, by this connexion, Johnson ‘was in a great measure absorbed from the society of his old friends.’ (Birkbeck Hill’s _Boswell_, 1887, iii. 225.) Line 72 in the first edition reads— The one at the House, and the other with THRALE. They both of them merry and authors like you. ‘They’ should apparently be ‘they’re.’ The first version reads— Who dabble and write in the Papers—like you.