1.
For Johnson's advice about bleeding, see _ante_, iii. 152; and for
possible occasions for 'suspected letters,' _ante_, i. 472, n. 4;
and ii. 202, n. 2.
_Mr. Mason's 'sneering observation in his "Memoirs of Mr. William
Whitehead"'_
(Vol. i, p. 31.)
I had long failed to find a copy of these _Memoirs_, though I had
searched in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the London Library, and
had applied to the University Library at Cambridge, and the Advocates'
Library at Edinburgh. By the kindness of Mr. R. H. Soden Smith and Mr.
R. F. Sketchley, I have obtained the following extract from a copy in
the Dyce and Forster Libraries, in the South Kensington Museum:--
'Conscious, notwithstanding, that to avoid writing what is _unnecessary_
is, in these days, no just plea for silence in a biographer, I have some
apology to make for having strewed these pages so thinly with the
tittle-tattle of anecdote. I am, however, too proud to make this apology
to any person but my bookseller, who will be the only real loser by the
'Those readers, who believe that I do not write immediately under
his pay, and who may have gathered from what they have already read,
that I am not so passionately enamoured of Dr. Johnson's biographical
manner, as to take that for my model, have only to throw these pages
aside, and wait till they are new-written by some one of his numerous
disciples, who may follow his master's example; and should more anecdote
than I furnish him with be wanting (as was the Doctor's case in his
life of Mr.
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