Routh, the old President of Magdalen, telling me of an
interview and conversation between Dr. Johnson and Dr. Parr, in the
course of which the former made use of some expression respecting the
latter, which considerably wounded and offended him. "Sir," he said
to Dr. Johnson, "you know that what you have just said will be known
in four-and-twenty hours over this vast metropolis." Upon which Dr.
Johnson's manner altered, his eye became calm, and he put out his hand,
and said, "Forgive me, Parr, I didn't quite mean it." "But," said the
President, with an amused and amusing look, "_I never could get him to
tell me what it was Dr. Johnson had said!_" He spoke of seeing Dr.
Johnson going up the steps into University College, dressed, I think,
in a snuff-coloured coat.'
Dr. Martin Joseph Routh, who was President of Magdalen College for
sixty-four years, was born in 1755 and died on December 22, 1854.
'_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_.'
(Vol. iv, p. 181, n. 3.)
Malone's note on _The Rape of Lucrece_ must have been, not as I
conjectured on line 1111, but on lines 1581-2:--
'It easeth some, though none it ever cured,
To think their dolour others have endured.'
With these lines may be compared Satan's speech in _Paradise Regained_,
Book i, lines 399-402:--
'Long since with woe
Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof,
That fellowship in pain divides not smart,
Nor lightens aught each man's peculiar load.
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